CFOW Newsletter - Focus on Biden's "Pivot to Asia" - and why the peace movement must pivot also

Concerned Families of Westchester Newsletter

September 19, 2021

 

Hello All – Beginning with President Obama, and continuing now under President Biden, the US military-foreign policy elite has attempted to extract itself from the quicksand of the wars in the Middle East and make a "pivot to Asia."  This has been accompanied by a media and White House drumbeat of alarm over China's "aggression," and – more mutedly – over China's economic challenge to US post-Cold War hegemony in the world.  With the extraction of US troops from Afghanistan, the USA may be on the cusp of a dangerous escalation of conflict with China.  What to do?

 

It has been said that "war is God's way of teaching American's geography."  True or not, we must bite the bullet and spend some time with a map of the South China Sea.  We will note that this is in fact adjacent to China, and very far from California or Washington, DC.  Next, we should make a stop at the admirable website of the Committee for a SANE US-China Policy.  There we learn that, since January 1, 2021, there have been 40 "provocative military maneuvers and close encounters" between US and Chinese planes and ships in the South China Sea, near Taiwan, or elsewhere; of which 25 were initiated by the USA. Could something go wrong?

 

Other indicators of the intensifying US-China conflict are the add-ons to US military budget proposals that supposedly counter China.  A report from Brown University's Watson Center notes: "The China threat argument has been utilized to justify the quest for a 350 ship Navy—up from about 300 ships currently; major Air Force purchases like a new bomber and the F-35 combat aircraft; the Pentagon's $1.5 trillion, three decades-long proposed nuclear weapons upgrade plan" … and much more.

 

Yet USA collaboration with China is essential to address significant problems of mutual interest.  For example, the looming food crisis in Afghanistan requires collaboration between the USA and Afghanistan's neighbors, including China, now with significant influence in Afghanistan.  An even more pressing issue is the climate crisis, which requires collaboration and significant cooperation between the US and China if humanity is to survive.  In short, just as the Biden administration is launched on its "pivot toward China," the US peace movement needs to match this new development, learning and educating others about the nuts and bolts of war and peace in the South China Sea.

 

News Notes

This week the US military retracted its previous claims and admitted that its drone attack that killed 10 people in Kabul was "a horrible mistake," and not a "righteous" assassination of a would-be ISIS suicide bomber.  In a statement, BanKillerDrones said, ""The Pentagon's and Biden administration's efforts to cover-up the truth about the slaughter of 10 civilians in Kabul on Aug. 29, seven of them children, is simply an example of the on-going cover-up of killer drone atrocities that have been perpetrated by every U.S. administration since the first U.S. drone attack, in Afghanistan, on October 7, 2001, the day the U.S. invaded that tortured nation."  To sign a petition urging President Biden to end drone attacks on Afghanistan, go here.

 

Growing US aggressiveness towards China and Russia underscores the importance of preventing conflicts that could lead to nuclear war.  Last week Congressional Progressive Caucus Chair Pramila Jayapal led a group of 28 Democrats to push back against President Biden's intention, exemplified by his 2022 budget proposal, to build up US nuclear weapons. The build-up takes off from the already inflated budget numbers of the Trump regime, and adds billions more. We are happy to note that CD congressional representative Jamaal Bowman is one of the signatories of the Democrats' anti-nuclear effort.

 

What may be the most set of congressional votes of Joe Biden's presidency will soon take place re: the linkage of the bipartisan infrastructure bill to the much bigger budget reconciliation process.  In a nutshell, progressive Democrats in the House have committed to withholding their votes from the bipartisan bill unless and until the infrastructure bill is passed.  If large enough, this group – though now numbering only 16 – may exercise the congressional muscle needed to push through both, rather than only one, of these important pieces of legislation.  The Rivertowns should be proud to note that Reps. Jamaal Bowman and Mondaire Jones among the progressives who have bravely committed themselves to this "both or none" strategy.

 

Finally, if you – like me – are among those who find maps useful and helpful in opening the door to new ways of looking at "familiar" things, I recommend The Decolonial Atlas. The curators of the site say "It's based on the premise that cartography is not as objective as we're made to believe. The orientation of a map, its projection, the presence of political borders … are all subject to the map-maker's bias – whether deliberate or not."  Enjoy! (h/t JS)

 

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 takes place every Monday from 5:30 to 6:00 pm in Yonkers at the intersection of Warburton Ave. and Odell.  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!

The Newsletter's "Rewards!" are usually lighter fare, a way station for stalwart readers before diving into Serious Business.  This week, however, I offer what was to me an extraordinarily interesting video interview between Sarah Schulman, author of a new book on the history of ACT-UP, and Rebecca Vilkomerson, a leader of Jewish Voice for Peace.  The subject is how ACT-UP succeeded and failed in developing strategy and tactics for a movement composed (primarily) of hundreds of New Yorkers facing likely death due to the AIDS epidemic.  Schulman's giant archive of interviews with activists was also instrumental in developing the earlier documentary film "United in Anger: A History of ACT-UP." I learned a lot from the Schulman-Vilkomerson discussion, and I think others may also.

 

Best Wishes,

Frank Brodhead

For CFOW

 

CFOW Weekly Reader

 

(Video) Who Rules Asia?: An Interview with Noam Chomsky

Interviewed by Jenny Li, New Bloom Magazine [June 2021]

---- We have an enormous responsibility today to prevent the kinds of conflicts that are coming, that are brewing, that are developing. And if permitted, the current course is pursued, will very likely lead to extremely dangerous situations, possibly even nuclear war. And a nuclear war between major powers is simply unthinkable. It would essentially destroy everything. It would leave the kind of world nobody would want to live in. How is it happening? Just take a look at what's happening right off the coast of China. Chinese warplanes have penetrated the air defense system of Taiwan. The United States has sent a huge naval armada, two major aircraft carrier groups into the South China Sea, an area of enormous strategic importance for China. Any of these things could blow up at any moment off the coast of China. Notice, it's not in the Caribbean Sea. It's not the Eastern Pacific, the Eastern Pacific off the coast of California. It's off the coast of China. China is ringed with nuclear bases, a circle of containment, nuclear missiles aimed at China from U.S. bases all through the Pacific. What's called "The Quad," the four major Asian U.S. allies, Japan… The United States itself is devoting enormous efforts to try to prevent China's development. It's pretty shocking to look at it. We should be cooperating. It is necessary for China and the United States, two major economies, to be cooperating on all sorts of issues, crucial issues like global warming, pandemics, nuclear weapons." [See the Program] For a transcript, go here.

 

A Legendary Abortion Rights Activist on What Comes After Texas

By Heather Souvaine Horn, The New Republic [September 8, 2021]

---- When Heather Booth helped a friend's sister obtain an abortion in 1965, she thought it would be a one-off situation. Instead, it became the start of a legendary underground operation known as the Jane Collective, or simply Jane. In the years leading up to the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision, the Jane Collective helped thousands of pregnant people in the Chicago area and beyond obtain abortions in defiance of strict statewide bans—establishing procedures to protect and support those seeking them and those providing them, and also to promote safety. Now, following Texas's law to ban abortions after six weeks (before many people know they are pregnant) and award private citizens $10,000 for suing anyone remotely involved in a procedure beyond those weeks, the right to an abortion, already something that existed more in theory than reality for much of the country, seems ever more uncertain. Many activists are turning to earlier generations for lessons on how to resist restrictions and get care to those who need it. I called up Booth to ask her about Jane's history and her perspective on the new law. [Read More]

 

(Video) "Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire": How Racism Fueled U.S. Wars Post-9/11

From Democracy Now! [September 14, 2021]

---- According to the Costs of War Project, the wars launched by the United States following 9/11 have killed an estimated 929,000 people in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen and elsewhere. The true death toll may never be known, but the vast majority of the victims have been Muslim. "Racism is baked into the security logic of the national security state in the U.S., as well as in terms of how it operates abroad," says Islamophobia scholar Deepa Kumar, a professor of media studies at Rutgers University. "The war on terror was sold to the American public using Orientalist and racist ideas that these societies are backward." [See the Program]

 

The Climate Crisis

[FB – It's hard to overstate the importance of the Glasgow climate summit, which will start on October 31^st and go through November 12^th.  As the articles linked below show, the Earth is rapidly warming towards a 2 degree Celsius temperature increase, now viewed as guaranteeing catastrophe.  Two days ago, the head of the United Nations warned that the summit risked failure: "There is still a level of mistrust, between north and south, developed and developing countries, that needs to be overcome. We are on the verge of the abyss."  In the USA, the "Green New Deal" – the most hopeful climate policy now on the legislative table – is bound up with President Biden's infrastructure proposal, whose legislative success is in doubt.  We must renew our efforts to demand effective policies to prevent climate catastrophe.]

 

New Climate Analysis Shows Near Total Global Failure to Meet 1.5°C Targets

By Andrea Germanos, Common Dreams [September 15, 2021]

---- A new analysis reveals a near total global failure of governments to have climate action and targets on track for limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. Released Wednesday by the Climate Action Tracker (CAT), the assessment rated just one nation, The Gambia, as "1.5°C Paris Agreement compatible," and found the United States' overall climate action—despite a welcome "U-turn on climate change" since the Trump administration—to be "insufficient." The analysis, which covered policies of 36 nations and the European Union, framed the widespread failings as particularly glaring given the "absolute urgency" of climate action made clear by the most recent IPCC report, a publication United Nations chief António Guterres declared "a code red for humanity." [Read More]

 

Also informative is "What's Up With COP26?" by Robert Hunziker, Counterpunch [September 17, 2021] [Link]. Famed climate scientist James Hansen warns that the worldwide decline of air pollution could increase the rate of global warming significantly. A recent international survey found that "Climate Inaction Has Left Majority of Young People Believing Humanity Is 'Doomed.'" But Friday's great action by Extinction Rebellion, protesting the continuing practice of major banks in investing in fossil fuels, shows that the fight back against the climate crisis is alive and well.

 

The State of the Union

We Are on the Precipice of a Housing Disaster

By Rev. Dr. Liz Theoharis, The Poor People's Campaign [September 17, 2021]

[FB – Once again, we need to deploy a strong "inside-outside" strategy:  intense community-based agitation for housing justice coordinated with work inside local, state, and federal legislatures to prevent homeless for millions of people.]

---- "The coronavirus pandemic could result in some 28 million Americans being evicted.… By comparison, 10 million people lost their homes in the Great Recession." These predictions come, in part, from Emily Benfer, the chair of the American Bar Association's Task Force Committee on Eviction and cocreator with the Eviction Lab at Princeton University of the Covid-19 Housing Policy Scorecard. She observes, "We have never seen this extent of eviction in such a truncated amount of time in our history." … Those facing eviction, those underpaid and excluded, and many of the 140 million people who are poor and low-income can't wait for those in power to act (if they ever do). Grassroots efforts like the National Union of the Homeless, Housing Justice for All, Cancel the Rents, Homes Guarantee, and other networks promoting rent strikes and eviction resistance will continue to organize to ensure that all Americans have a place to live, thrive, and build the sort of society we know is possible. [Read More]

 

Our History – The 10^th Anniversary of "Occupy Wall St."

Life can be different: 10 years ago, Occupy Wall Street changed the world

By Rebecca Nathanson, The Guardian [September 15, 2021]

---- Occupy Wall Street politicized an entire generation – one that grew up under George W Bush in the post-9/11 years, pinning all their hopes on Barack Obama. Let down when his message of "hope and change" failed to manifest after the 2008 global financial crisis, they began to question American political and economic institutions themselves. I was one of those millennials. The movement upended my life, introducing me to new politics and people. It also upended the world, part of a string of uprisings that spread from Tunisia and Egypt to Spain and Chile to, finally, the United States. Occupy's rise in 2011 marked the re-entry of class consciousness into mainstream American politics. Occupy had two pillars: its critique of inequality, and its vision of an alternative way of organizing society. The former moved from the fringe to the center, bringing inequality into the national discourse; the latter has been largely overlooked. The movement made decisions by consensus, which was messy and slow, but it also challenged the idea that the way we live is a given. [Read More]

 

(Video) "Another World Is Possible": How Occupy Wall Street Reshaped Politics & Kicked Off New Era of Protest

From Democracy Now! [September 17, 2021]

---- On the 10th anniversary of Occupy Wall Street, we examine the legacy of the historic protests with three veterans of the movement: Nelini Stamp, now the director of strategy and partnerships at the Working Families Party; Jillian Johnson, a key organizer in Occupy Durham who now serves on the Durham City Council and is the city's mayor pro tempore; and writer and filmmaker Astra Tayor, an organizer with the Debt Collective. Occupy Wall Street "broke the spell" protecting the economic status quo and marked a major shift in protests against capitalism, Taylor says. "Occupy kind of inaugurated this social movement renaissance," she tells Democracy Now! "We've been in an age of defiant protest ever since Occupy Wall Street. [See the Program{

 

Also of interest – "Did Occupy Wall Street Make a Difference?" by Ruth Milkman, et al., The Nation [September 17, 2021] [Link]; "What Occupy Wall Street Organizers Would Do Differently. Do they still stand by the leaderless revolution?" The Nation [Link]; "The Impact of Occupy Wall Street Continues to Grow" by John Tarleton, The Indypendent [September 15, 2021] [Link]; and "Occupy Memory" by Molly Crabapple, New York Review of Books [Link].

 

CFOW Newsletter - Focus on 9/11 and its Legacy

Concerned Families of Westchester Newsletter

September 12, 2021

 

Hello All – Yesterday's memorial events for the victims of the 9/11 attacks stuck carefully to the events of that day alone. We mourned the deaths of those who died at the hands of the terrorists, and those first-responders who were killed attempting to save them.  But because 9/11 follows so closely on the heels of the collapse of the US project in Afghanistan, which was joined at the hip to the attacks on 9/11, we averted our eyes from the transition of the victim into the aggressor, and the waste of hundreds of thousands of lives and trillions of dollars that ensued.  What are the lessons, the legacies, of 9/11 and 20 years of war? Who will frame this narrative?

 

In addition to the tragedy and terror of 20 years of war, looking back we can see that "9/11" did enormous, perhaps irreparable, damage to our country.  In the New York Times last week, Michelle Goldberg wrote: "The attacks, and our response to them, catalyzed a period of decline that helped turn the United States into the debased, half-crazed fading power we are today." Yet in the discourse of our political and media elites over the last week, there is little indication that any "lessons" have been learned, that new targets and more victims of war will not be found.  For Concerned Families of Westchester, which marks its 20^th anniversary today, there is no reason to think that the end of the war in Afghanistan will also end the need for desperate efforts on behalf of peace and justice.

 

In early 2002, CFOW began a collaboration with September 11th Families for Peaceful Tomorrows, a newly formed organization composed of people who had lost loved ones in the 9/11 attacks and rejected the use of these deaths as a justification for war.  "Not in Our Name!" was their cry. Early members were Westchester's Phyllis and Orlando Rodriguez, whose son was killed in the World Trade Center.  One of our first speakers at Dobbs' South Presbyterian Church was Peaceful Tomorrow's member Rita Lasar, (shown here with Westchester's Masuda Sultan, who lost 19 family members during the early days of the US bombing of Afghanistan.)  Rita's brother Abe was killed in the South Tower because his best friend was in a wheelchair, and they waited together to be rescued.  When President Bush used the "selfless example" of her brother Abe to justify revenge, Rita's letter protesting this – Not in his name! – was published in the New York Times; and she later joined a delegation of similarly bereaved people to Afghanistan, where they met and consoled people there who had lost loved ones to US bombs.  The courageous people who came together in February 2002 to form September 11^th Families for Peaceful Tomorrows illuminated a path in those dark days that remains with us still,  invoking Martin Luther King's injunction that "wars are poor chisels for carving out peaceful tomorrows."

 

Some useful reading about September 11, 2001

 

I Lost My Father on 9/11, but I Never Wanted to Be a "Victim"

By Leila Murphy, The Nation [September 9, 2021]

 

(Video) "Turning Point": Legacy of the U.S. Response to 9/11 Is Terror, Domestic Surveillance & Drones – From Democracy Now! [September 9, 2021]

 

9/11 and the Saudi Connection

By Eric Lichtblau and James Risen, The Intercept [September 11, 2021]

 

The Accumulated Evil of the Whole: Bush and Co. made the September 11 Attacks a Pretext for War on Iraq

By Juan Cole, Informed Comment [September 11, 2021]

 

(Video) "9/11's Unsettled Dust": Bush's EPA Hid Health Risks from Toxic Dust at Ground Zero & Thousands Died – From Democracy Now! [September 7, 2021]

 

News Notes

An extraordinary 10-minute video accompanies this shattering investigation by the New York Times into the drone assassination of an Afghan NGO worker and nine members of his family (mostly children) in the last days of the US occupation: "In U.S. Drone Strike, Evidence Suggests No ISIS Bomb."  As happens so often with US precision, surgical strikes via drone, their target turned out to be a civilian. [LInk].

 

In the wake of the US collapse in Afghanistan, commentary by Noam Chomsky is in high demand.  Among this week's interviews are "The US-Led "War on Terror" Has Devastated Much of the World" from Truthout;  and two videos: "American Empire After 20 Years in Afghanistan"] from Jacobin Magazine, and "Noam Chomsky weighs in on Afghanistan" from Gulf News. All are interesting, imo.

 

Finally, the stalwarts at the UK's Extinction Rebellion have just published "Global Newsletter #55 - Power to the People! Rebellion Returns!"  Needless to say, it's full of action and plans for more action. Read it here.

 

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 takes place every Monday from 5:30 to 6:00 pm in Yonkers at the intersection of Warburton Ave. and Odell.  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!

Most weeks, the Newsletter's "Rewards!" are a change-of-pace, some music or item of interest that is off-topic, diverting, hopefully enjoyable.  That doesn't seem right this week.  Here instead is Estonian composer Arvo Part's "Cantus in Memoriam Benjamin Britten," a short piece that, for me, captures the mourning, loss, tragedy, and waste of 9/11 and the 20 Years War that followed.

 

Best wishes,

Frank Brodhead

For CFOW

 

CFOW Weekly Reader

 

The only way to effectively counter terror is to end war

By Kathy Kelly September 10, 2021

---- The U.S. government and military exploited the grief and shock following the 9/11 attacks to raise fears, promote Islamophobia and launch forever wars which continue to this day. Under the guise of "counter-terrorism," the United States now pledges to combine drone attacks, surveillance, airstrikes and covert operations to continue waging war in Afghanistan. Terror among Afghans persists. … We should be honest. The Taliban are in power today because of a colossal mess the United States helped create. Now, we U.S. citizens must insist on paying reparations for destruction caused by 20 years of war. To be meaningful, reparations must also include dismantling the warfare systems that caused so much havoc and misery. Our wars of choice were waged against people who meant us no harm. We must choose, now, to lay aside the cruel futility of our forever wars. … We must express true sorrow, seek forgiveness, and show valor similar to that of the brave people insisting on human rights in Afghanistan today. Collectively, recognizing the terrible legacy of 9/11, we must agree: To counter terror, abolish war. [Read More]

 

The $8 Trillion Cost of Failure

By Tom Engelhardt, Tom Dispatch [September 8, 2021]

---- They weren't kidding when they called Afghanistan the "graveyard of empires." Indeed, that cemetery has just taken another imperial body. And it wasn't pretty, was it? Not that anyone should be surprised. Even after 20 years of preparation, a burial never is.  In fact, the shock and awe(fulness) in Kabul and Washington over these last weeks shouldn't have been surprising, given our history. … This is a land that's crumbling before our eyes, being (un)built month by month, year by year. Its political system is on the verge of dissolving into who knows what amid a raft of voter suppression laws, wild claims about the most recent presidential election, an assault on the Capitol itself, and conspiracy theories galore. Its political parties seem ever more hostile, disturbed, and disparate. Its economy is a gem of inequality, its infrastructure crumbling, its society seemingly coming apart at the seams. And on a planet that could be turning into a genuine graveyard of empires (and of so much else), keep in mind that, if you're losing your war with climate change, you can't withdraw from it. You can't declare defeat and go home. You're already home in the increasingly dysfunctional, increasingly (un)built US of A. [Read More]

 

September 11 and the Debacle of 'Nation-Building' in Iraq and Afghanistan

[FB – Walden Bello frames the US failures in Afghanistan and Iraq within the experiences of previous colonial efforts in The Philippines, Japan, and Vietnam.]

---- Like all other imperial powers, the US could not just wreck a society and engage in a purely military occupation of Afghanistan. Like all of them, it had to reconstruct a society, if only to reduce the costs of military occupation and give its venture a patina of legitimacy among both Afghans and Americans. And, like all, it could not help but attempt to reconstruct a society in its own image, even if the result was in reality a disfigured or distorted copy of itself. In the case of the United States, reconstructing Afghanistan and later Iraq in its own image meant trying to create an avatar of American liberal democracy. The term for this process given by American policy makers was "nation-building." However, a more accurate term to describe the American way of politically managing conquered societies is "liberal democratic reconstruction." …The ideology of liberal democratic reconstruction had been merely shelved, not buried. It received a new lease on life in the early 2000s, after the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. There were a number of factors that went into the invasions of both countries, including vengeance for 9/11, but both countries were essentially seen as providing Washington opportunities to reshape the global political environment after the Cold War. [Read More]

 

Also of interest re: Afghanistan – Two informative videos: from Code Pink, "Afghanistan – What Next?" with Sonali Kolhatkar and Phyllis Bennis [Link]; and from Democracy Now! – "Taliban's New Acting Government Filled with Hard-Liners, No Women Is "Disappointing" as Protests Grow," with Danish Afghan journalist Nagieb Khaja  [Link].  Also informative is "The Other Afghan Women" by Anand Gopal, The New Yorker [September 6, 2021] – about rural women - [Link].

 

The Climate Crisis

Imagine If We Had Spent the Last 20 Years Fighting Climate Change Instead of the War on Terror

By Sarah Lazare, In These Times [September 7, 2021]

---- Twenty years into a nebulous ​"War on Terror," the United States is in the grips of a full-fledged climate crisis. Hurricane Ida, whose severity is a direct result of human-made climate change, flooded cities, cut off power to hundreds of thousands, killed at least 60 people, and left elderly people dying in their homes and in squalid evacuation facilities. This followed a summer of heat waves, wildfires and droughts — all forms of extreme weather that the Global South has borne the brunt of, but are now, undeniably, the new ​"normal" in the United States. The U.S. government has turned the whole globe into a potential battlefield, chasing some ill-defined danger ​"out there," when, in reality, the danger is right here — and is partially of the U.S. government's own creation. Plotting out the connections between this open-ended war and the climate crisis is a grim exercise, but an important one. It's critical to examine how the War on Terror not only took up all of the oxygen when we should have been engaged in all-out effort to curb emissions, but also made the climate crisis far worse, by foreclosing on other potential frameworks under which the United States could relate with the rest of the world. Such bitter lessons are not academic: There is still time to stave off the worst climate scenarios, a goal that, if attained, would likely save hundreds of millions of lives, and prevent entire countries from being swallowed into the sea. [Read More]

 

Also useful/interesting on the climate crisis – "Indigenous Resistance Instrumental in Stopping High-Profile Fossil Fuel Projects, Says Report," by Nick Cunningham, DeSmog Blog [September 8, 2021] [Link]; and "A Climate Disaster Is Unfolding Before Our Eyes—And Politicians Still Refuse to Take Action" by Sonali Kolhatkar, Naked Capitalism [September 8, 2021] [Link].

 

Civil Liberties

Muslim man spent 15 years in prison after post-9/11 crackdown

From Aljazeera [September 11, 2021]

---- For Yassin M Aref, the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks is a sad reminder of 15 lost years spent in American prisons. Aref, 51, a Kurdish man and former mosque leader at the Masjid As-Salam in Albany, was arrested in 2004 on a conspiracy charge brought by the FBI in a "sting operation". He was accused of aiding "terrorism" based on "secret" evidence. … Aref was deported to the Kurdish region of northern Iraq in 2019 after his release. Aref and his wife, Zuhur, live together while their four children, two boys and two girls, are studying in the US. On July 2 he published his memories in Kurdish. The book is more than 1,000 pages and includes details of his arrest and his life in prison. Son of Mountains is his English version of the memoir that was published in the US in 2008. [Read More]

 

For more on police surveillance/trickery – "Cameras, Drones and X-Ray Vans: How 9/11 Transformed the N.Y.P.D. Forever," by Ali Watkins, New York Times [September 8, 2021] [Link]; and "9/11 militarized law enforcement and made every American a suspect" by Christopher J. Coyne and Abigail R. Hall, Responsible Statecraft [September 6, 2021] [Link].

 

Our History

The 19th Century's 9/11

By Marc Steiner, The Nation [September 10, 2021]

---- Long before the 9/11 of 20 years ago, another episode of violence took place on that day in 1851. That September 11 is long forgotten, despite its being one of the country's most seminal events. Most Americans called it the Christiana Riot. To Quakers and others who opposed slavery, it was known as the Christiana Resistance. In the early 1850s, America was already at war with itself, over slavery and its expansion into new territories. Abolitionists, while representing a political minority, were highly organized, and 100,000 members of the population had become fugitives from slavery. In response, in 1850, Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Act, making it a federal crime to assist those seeking freedom. The act also ordered the US Marshals to pursue runaway slaves, monetarily incentivizing slave catchers and creating an industry of hunting down Black Americans, whether free or enslaved. The Christiana Resistance represented the first challenge to the Fugitive Slave Act, culminating in a violent confrontation between fugitive slaves and enslavers. [Read More]

 

 

CFOW Newsletter - Focus on Criminalizing Abortion in the USA

Concerned Families of Westchester Newsletter

September 5, 2021

 

Hello All – The Texas anti-abortion law and the scandalous action of the Supreme Court in letting it go into effect without even a hearing is a "tocsin in the night." It would be irresponsible not to anticipate that many other states will follow suit, simply Xeroxing and passing the Texas law.  We should also anticipate that there is a high probability that the Supreme Court may overturn Roe v. Wade when it hears a case from Mississippi that will do just that. Reading the powerful dissent from Associate Justice Sonia Sotomayor underscores the gravity of this moment for democracy and the rule of law, as well as for the millions of women now threatened with loss of control over their reproduction plans and preferences.

 

The imminent end to legal abortion in the USA is bad enough.  I would like to suggest also that we should frame this as part of the growing fascist movement in this country.  The history of the anti-abortion movement (e.g. here and here) shows how a fringe and largely Catholic-based demand was absorbed into a post-Vietnam War "New Right," a rebellion against the gains of feminists and the civil rights movement, and the counter-culture of the '60s.  By the mid-late 1970s, this "New Right" had gained hegemony within the Republican Party, electing Ronald Reagan in 1980.  And this movement only strengthened in the decades between Reagan and the election of Donald Trump.

 

In an imo prescient article last month in The Nation, Katha Pollitt warned "If Roe v. Wade Is Overturned, the Future Will Be Worse Than the Past." She pointed to the well-organized, indeed militarized, anti-abortion right wing of today, compared to the disparate protesters of yesteryear.  Can we imagine that "Call Jane" would work unmolested in Texas and other conservative states? That organizations collecting funds for women to travel out of state for abortions would not soon see their day in court? I read with interest another Nation article, this one by Amy Littlefield from last April, in which she wrote about the abortion medication available through the mail; will anti-abortion states like Texas allow this?  How will the Court rule when cases like this and other work-arounds to heinous state laws reach them?

 

On Thursday, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said that the House will vote on legislation to guarantee access to abortion soon after its return to Washington on September 20^th [Link].  Needless to say, even if the Democratic-controlled House passes such legislation, it will face the certainty of a Republican filibuster in the Senate.  To stop "The Handmaid's Tale" from becoming a reality, we have our work cut out from us.

 

News Notes

The Biden administration will mark Labor Day by ending the Covid-linked program that gives unemployed workers an additional $300 per week. Some 9.2 million people will lose this benefit, which will affect a total of 34 million household members. [Link]  There is no visible support in Congress for extending this benefit, whose termination is driven in part by a labor shortage that has resulted in a rise in real wages and a decline in the poverty level of working people, which of course must be nipped in the bud.

 

Coming soon is the 10^th anniversary of Occupy Wall St.  Many CFOW stalwarts participated in the action at Zuccotti Park, and we even held a (small) "Occupy" event at the Hastings Community Center. For those paying attention, Occupy made some significant changes in US politics, not least by putting "the 1 percent" and "the 99 percent" into play. Here is a useful Occupy timeline from Rolling Stone; and here is a great album of Occupy pictures. Movement documentarian Erik McGregor ("he is everywhere") will participate in a photo exhibition at the Revelation Gallery at St. John's in the Village (224 Waverly Place) that runs from September 7^th to October 3^rd. For more information, go here.

 

Finally, the 50^th anniversary of the Attica prison rebellion falls on Thursday, September 9^th.  The prisoners demanded basic, humanitarian reforms; and Gov. Nelson Rockefeller responded with force and violence on September 13^th, with great loss of life.  The number of prisoners in the USA in 1970 was 300,000, a number that has now grown to 2.4 million. As the organizers of a commemorative event note, "five decades later we look back at the uprising and how we continue to fight to make the vision of the Attica Brothers a reality." For a preview, check out this video from the 40^th anniversary commemoration,, with Cornell West.

 

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 takes place every Monday from 5:30 to 6:00 pm in Yonkers at the intersection of Warburton Ave. and Odell.  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!

This week's Rewards for stalwart readers are all about Labor Day, the American imitation of May Day. There are lots of great labor songs out there; for Rewards this week I have chosen "Labor Day" by John McCutheon; "Union Maid" by Marcia Diehl and the New Harmony Sisterhood; Woody Guthrie's "Deportees" by Ani DiFranco and Ry Cooder, and "There is Power in a Union" by Billy Bragg.  Enjoy!

 

Best wishes,

Frank Brodhead

For CFOW

 

CFOW Weekly Reader

 

Afghanistan Update

As we noted in the last Newsletter, CFOW suggests framing our peace & justice demands for USA policy towards "postwar" Afghanistan along the following lines:

 

Let Them In! – To the vast amount of media coverage about people desperate to leave Afghanistan, we want to speak up for an inclusive, rather than a restrictive, approach to immigrant rules.  We should resist bureaucratic distinctions between "deserving" and "not deserving" refugees.  Welcome them all.

 

Feed Them! – The UN's World Food Program estimates that more than14 million people urgently need food assistance.  The US can help with funding and by taking no military or other steps that might endanger the program. Put the Afghan people first.

 

Give Peace a Chance! – The United States should accept the fact that the Taliban will control the new state, and not engage in further military or other actions pointing to "regime change. Aid and development assistance should be sent to Afghanistan.

 

Investigate Who Was Responsible for This Disaster – Congress should investigate the decisions to start the war in 2001.  CIA and Pentagon liars, war-profiteers, and the media should be held accountable. We must prevent future wars.

 

Regarding the above, US immigration policy for Afghanistan refugees is still unclear; the Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) has a petition for us to sign: [Link].  The food crisis in Afghanistan continues to grow: This "Infographic" illuminates the extent of the crisis.  Kathy Kelly, who visited Afghanistan dozens of times during the war, spoke on Democracy Now! about the reparations we must make for the damage we've done to Afghanistan.

 

The issues of US policy towards a Taliban government, and how/why the USA got into this mess, are complex.  In The Intercept, James Risen ("A War's Epitaph") has written an in-depth analysis of the cascade of government and media lies that enabled 20 years of evil in Afghanistan [Link]; and Gareth Porter has an excellent essay on the continuing "Beltway media's loyalty to permanent war state" [Link]. Further analysis about US policy going forward can be found in the readings below"

 

 

 

Some useful reading on Afghanistan

 

America Is Giving the World a Disturbing New Kind of War

By Samuel Moyn, The New Times [September 3, 2021]

---- More humane war became a companion to an increasingly interventionist foreign policy. Earlier wars had not needed to appear humane to win legitimacy from the public, but new ones returned in an altered moral climate. By the post-Cold War era, both American political parties were committed to a more principled use of American power. Doctrines like democracy promotion and human rights became elaborate rationales for doubling down on militarism. [Read More]

 

Afghan Crisis Must End America's Empire of War, Corruption and Poverty

By Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J. S. Davies, Common Dreams [August 30, 2021]

---- To read or listen to Western analysts, one would think that the United States and its allies' 20-year war was a benign and beneficial effort to modernize the country, liberate Afghan women and provide healthcare, education and good jobs, and that this has all now been swept away by capitulation to the Taliban. The reality is quite different, and not so hard to understand. The United States spent $2.26 trillion on its war in Afghanistan. Spending that kind of money in any country should have lifted most people out of poverty. But the vast bulk of those funds, about $1.5 trillion, went to absurd, stratospheric military spending to maintain the U.S. military occupation, drop over 80,000 bombs and missiles on Afghans, pay private contractors, and transport troops, weapons and military equipment back and forth around the world for 20 years. [Read More]

 

(Video) A CIA Drone Analyst Apologizes to the People of Afghanistan

From Democracy Now! [September 3, 2021]

As the United States ends a 20-year occupation of Afghanistan, a former intelligence analyst for the CIA's drone program offers an apology to the people of Afghanistan "from not only myself, but from the rest of our society as Americans." During deployments to Afghanistan, Christopher Aaron says he was able to see "the human toll, the resource toll of these wars, as well as the fact that the policy of dropping 'guided missiles' at people from remote controlled airplanes was not allowing us to actually win the war." [See the Program]

 

War & Peace

Over Two Decades, U.S.'s Global War on Terror Has Taken Nearly 1 Million Lives and Cost $8 Trillion

By Murtaza Hussain, The Intercept [September 1, 2021]

---- The U.S.-led global war on terror has killed nearly 1 million people globally and cost more than $8 trillion since it began two decades ago. These staggering figures come from a landmark report issued Wednesday by Brown University's Costs of War Project, an ongoing research effort to document the economic and human impact of post-9/11 military operations. … The staggering economic costs of the war on terror pale in comparison to the direct human impact, measured in people killed, wounded, and driven from their homes. The Costs of War Project's latest estimates hold that 897,000 to 929,000 people have been killed during the wars. Of those killed, 387,000 are categorized as civilians, 207,000 as members of national military and police forces, and a further 301,000 as opposition fighters killed by U.S.-led coalition troops and their allies. The report also found that around 15,000 U.S. military service members and contractors have been killed in the wars, along with a similar number of allied Western troops deployed to the conflicts and several hundred journalists and humanitarian aid workers. [Read More]

 

Civil Liberties

'I Helped Destroy People' [The FBI and Muslims}

By Janet Reitman, New York Times Magazine [September 1, 2021]

---- This article is a product of close to three years of interviews with Terry Albury, whom I met for the first time in November 2018, shortly before he went to prison. … "I was very idealistic when I joined the F.B.I.," Albury says. "I really wanted to make the world a better place, and I stayed as long as I did because I continued to believe that I could help make things better, as naïve as that sounds. But the war on terror is like this game, right? We've built this entire apparatus and convinced the world that there is a terrorist in every mosque, and that every newly arrived Muslim immigrant is secretly anti-American, and because we have promoted that false notion, we have to validate it. So we catch some kid who doesn't know his ear from his [expletive] for building a bomb fed to them by the F.B.I., or we take people from foreign countries where they have secret police and recruit them as informants and capitalize on their fear to ensure there is compliance. It's a very dangerous and toxic environment, and we have not come to terms with the fact that maybe we really screwed up here," he says. "Maybe what we're doing is wrong." [Read More] – Terry Albury gave his documents to The Intercept, which edited and published them in an informative package of articles.  Read "The FBI's Secret Rules" by Cora Currier, The Intercept [January 31 2017 [Link]

 

Creeping Fascism

The new alliance between anti-vaxxers and the far right is a deadly threat [UK]

By Paul Mason, The New Statesman [UK] [September 1, 2021]

[FB – This imo interesting article from the UK by Paul Mason, one of their most insightful correspondents, assesses the strenuous UK "anti-vaxxer" movement in relation to the growth of the UK far right.  I found myself thinking about how/whether this analysis is useful for thinking about the development of the far right in the USA.]

---- The anti-vax movement has become a magnet for people engaged in anti-truth and anti-science politics, and an open conduit to the extreme right. Surveying press photography of the 28 August demos, it is clear that this is not the demographic of the Brexit Party – elderly white conservatives – and nor is it the demographic of Extinction Rebellion: educated, progressive, young and old. It is attracting ex-soldiers; young mothers conned by the idea that their children My impression is also that the movement is attracting a much larger number of low-income young people than mainstream politics does. They are, in short, what the psychiatrist Wilhelm Reich described in the 1930s as "people in trouble" – the raw material of early fascism. And all over the democratic world, both the populist right and the fascist right have latched on to their concerns and begun to mobilise them. [Read More]

 

Our History

The Biggest Uprising Since the Civil War Happened Here 100 Years Ago [Blair Mountain.]

By Samuel Fleischman, The Nation [August 30, 2021]

---- Heading east from here, County Road 17 snakes up and down craggy hills for several miles before crossing an unremarkable intersection. A deserted church sits on one corner. On the other, a small bronze plaque recounts the Battle of Blair Mountain, a labor dispute that saw almost 10,000 miners face off against a union-busting sheriff, several thousand deputized locals, and the US military. It was the largest armed uprising in the country since the Civil War. This year marks the 100th anniversary, yet hardly a soul today remembers it. … The situation only escalated in the summer of 1921 after hundreds of striking workers were arrested and held indefinitely. Hatfield's death was the final straw. By August, thousands of miners were marching toward Matewan, intent on freeing their comrades and bringing their guerilla version of class warfare into action. [Read More] A prelude to the Battle of Blair Mountain was the Battle of Matewan (1920), the subject of a great film by John Sayles ("Matewan"), which you can see here for free.