Time for some spring cleaning at Camp Casey, an opportunity to hang out some fresh laundry. We’ve sewn new colorful sheets and here are prospective banner slogans:
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Here’s an interesting banner we may opt not to fly just yet.
Kelly, Pallas and Cindy.
Camp Casey Colorado Springs own Pallas Stanford and IVAW co-founder Kelly Dougherty marched with Cindy Sheehan from Mobile to New Orleans. Also marching from Colorado Springs were veterans Joe Hatcher, Jeff Peskoff, Ethan Crowell, Alan Skinner, and Vietnam Veterans Against the War co-founder Terry Leichner.
The March 14-19 Vets Gulf March marked the third anniversary of the war in Iraq and was meant to highlight the relationship between the misappropriation of resources for the illegal war and the woeful assistance given to the Katrina Hurricane victims. The Colorado Springs delegation left from Camp Casey on March 12.
Cindy Sheehan had sent her greetings through Andy Braunstein when he was in DC, now she’s got our peace cap. The TAKING THE FUN OUT OF WAR cap from Colorado Springs’ ragtag peace camp!
The three remaining CPT captives, held hostage since Novemember 27 have been freed.
On DAY 119 of their captivity, on DAY 106 or so of the vigil which we’ve kept every day at noon, the BBC has just reported that the three CPT hostages, English Norman Kember and Canadians Jim Loney and Harmeet Singh Sooden, have been freed.
The news so far reports that they were liberated from their captors by a join military mission, the details and repercussions of which remain to be revealed. But it’s a happy day, the three CPT members are safe.
A little over a week ago, we learned that the fourth captive, American Tom Fox, had been killed. This was a fate which seemed improbable considering the mission of the Christian Peacemaker Team. They had been working without protection in Iraq to help families there negotiate for the release of their loved ones detained without due process in American prisons.
The memorial post we had erected for the CPT members will remain to shine the light on persons all over the world who are held in unlawful detainment. The post is still draped in black because of the death of Tom Fox, but soon we will raise another backdrop which will read: HUMAN RIGHTS FOR ALL CAPTIVES.
The noon vigil has proved itself to be an excellent touch stone for organizing our myriad other actions. It’s been an opportunity to stay apprised of the latest developments and strategies, and we’ve had occasion to be interviewed for three separate documentaries: one about American conscientious objectors who’ve removed themselves to Canada, another about the concept of Constantine’s Sword, and another about grassroots activism.
The local NBC affiliate 5/30 did an excellent story involving Camp Casey. See the video clip here.
They covered our Sunday morning send-off of IVAW members who were leaving to join the March 14 peace march along the Gulf Coast. And they also gave our banners some visibility.
THERE IS NO WAR ON TERROR flies in the face of the Media worldview. Let’s dispell a couple of other media reported fallacies, too verbose for banners.
Dubai port scandal
The problem with a port takeover by a Dubai owned company has nothing to do with U.S. security, not as concerns terrorists. The takeover is part of the larger globalization move to privatize world infrastructure and enforce “free trade” subjugation.
The only tie-in with terrorism has to do with Dubai’s involvement with the 9/11 hijackers. Whoever let 9/11 happen, under the nose of the FBI, could make something happen again, out of reach of American security agencies, facilitated with Dubai’s complicity.
Samarra mosque bombing
Who is it that wants a civil war in Iraq? The quick and mutually diffused tensions following the mosque bombing suggests that Iraqis do not want a civil war.
Evidence is pointing to U.S. involvement in the destruction of the Golden Dome Shrine in Samarra. Residents are fighting US and UK efforts to begin rebuilding the dome before the forensic evidence can be analyzed to determine the real culprits behind the explosives.
Experts doubt that Sunnis were behind the destruction of a mosque which is revered by both Shia ad Sunni alike. Pious peoples do not behave that way. Even the troubles in Ireland never devolved to exploding each other’s churches.
Where in the world are there peoples so uncultured, so spiritually callous, so uneducated, insentitive and irreverant that they destroy their brother’s places of worship?
(Sarah, Mimi, Amy, Evie, Lara, Ryan, Devon, Marie, David, Peter, Diann, Amber)
Our peaceful infiltration of the Old Colorado City St. Patricks Day Parade was great fun. We had to scale back our original plans for using the Peace Snake and the Blue Lady in favor of giving more visibility to our green peace t-shirts. Turnout for our peace contingent was affected by the cold and more specifically by a flu going around which hampered a number of families.
We were also handicapped by having to gather participants by word of mouth only. Our fear was that had any fliers been brought to the attention of parade organizers, we might have been thrown out of the parade before it even began. As it was, we waited to the last minute to don our t-shirts and to unfurl the banners. To the parade marshall’s credit, no one found our message objectionable, least of all the crowd.
The Old Colorado City crowd in attendance was very receptive to our march for peace. We carried two messages, the first in keeping with the bookmobile cover: “Education is the key to peace.” Lest that message have been thought too radical, we brought up the rear with a sentiment meant to sound familiar: “Peace on earth, good will to men.”
(Eric, Mark, Pattie, Amy F., Pallas)
Why were we so cautious with our message? The terms of the contract for participating in the parade read: ABSOLUTELY NO PROMOTION OF SOCIAL ISSUES. Stated in two places, the second time underlined. The final condition made clear that all decisions by the parade organizers would be final.
The parade was full of politicians, candidates, military recruiters and veterans groups. In fact this year there was more red white and blue than there was green. We did not anticipate that they would dare to take issue with advocates for peace, but we were taking no chances. An effort days earlier to solicit participants from a local elementary school met with resistance. Our intention to wear peace signs was deemed too political. On that basis we were not allowed to distribute fliers there about the event.
(Dennis, Steve, Amy and Hannah)
I went to a Democratic party fund-raiser last night, the TRUE BLUE AMERICAN RALLY. I stood by the door most of the night and handed out fliers about tomorrow’s meeting to reclaim the media. I knew all of the politicians who spoke, I knew the evening’s organizers, somehow it didn’t occur to me until that evening to ask to make an announcement for the Monday meeting. Here are my notes:
Hello, my name is Eric Verlo. You may recognize me from my involvement with Camp Casey, the persistent little peace camp on North Nevada Avenue. Hello.
This organisation was gracious enough to let me come up here and talk to you tonight. I’m speaking on behalf of another organization, the Pikes Peak Media Alliance. We’re a little group, started three years ago, which has been trying to raise awareness about media literacy. A number of my fellow members are here tonight. We recognize that the media landscape is, and has been, slanted against the little guy, the average American actually, and we’ve undertaken the challenge to change that imbalance.
I’m here tonight to tell you of our latest effort, I’ll try to be brief. We’ve been fighting to try to bring more of a community voice to the local public radio station, you love it, we love it, our own KRCC. The effort is going to culminate -thus far- into a town-hall public forum which we’ve scheduled for Monday night at All Souls Unitarian Church. We’re hoping to see as big a turn-out as possible of course. This will be a chance for Joe and Jane Public to express something of the direction they hope to see from KRCC, to express it directly to its regents, its owners, Colorado College.
This effort to seek community input into KRCC programming arose from a more specific attempt to lobby KRCC to air the news program Democracy Now. If you haven’t heard of it, ask the person beside you, it’s an award winning news program whose popularity is growing station by station all over this country, it’s on 400 radio stations nation wide, including more than a dozen communities in Colorado, all the big ones, except Colorado Springs and Pueblo, because it’s not on KRCC.
You may have heard of our efforts. For three years we’ve been trying to petition Colorado College to overrule KRCC’s decision not to carry Democracy Now. For years before that, individuals had been calling KRCC to request it, only to be turned down flat. That went on so long, we decided we had to go over the station manager’s head.
You may have signed one of our petitions. Did you hear anything back? No one did. Well a friend of mine submitted his letter directly. He did receive an answer to his request for Democracy Now: a hand written note saying “Thank you for your thoughts on democracy.”
We tried it several times and this year we made a concerted effort and gathered over 250 petition letters, individual letters signed and personalized by members of our community. A number of times people told us, “I signed one of those a couple years ago. What, they still haven’t given us Democracy Now?” That statement reflects not just their incredulousness, but it reflects a disconnect about what’s happening on KRCC. A lot of the community -on our side of the issues- is no longer listening to KRCC.
This year we delivered those 250 petition letters, along with another 200 Colorado College student signatures to Colorado College on our knees. On our knees! Yes it was a dumb idea, we got the idea because we were starting from Camp Casey and it was only a short distance to the college president’s office. Well on your knees that distance becomes quite a bit more than a little! We did it for the publicity of course, but ideologically we did it to represent the desperate urgency we felt for the people of the world who are not represented by or in the media, the suffering majority whose voices go unheard, whose plight goes unabated in large part because the media ignores their fate, a media who is on the side of their oppressors, who is owned after all by their oppressors.
And so we made this impassioned public plea, Dave was there with me on his bare knees, Gary was there, we handed over our petitions, and heard nothing. Not a thing. No one who signed any of those letter received a reply. We heard through the grapevine that Colorado College was basically standing in support of the KRCC station manager’s decision. Only just a week ago or so, we all saw in the Independent, the article about KRCC and some confusion about its funding, where on the issue of Democracy Now, the college declared that it considered the request to have come from only a “small faction.”
So the meeting tomorrow night, excuse me, Monday night is going to be the showdown between the community represented by its small faction, and Colorado College. We’ve dropped the explicit request for Democracy Now in hope that the meeting will represent more voices from the community about what its concerns may be about KRCC. The issue isn’t so much about Democracy Now, it’s about how does a community express itself to one of its representatives, in this case a station manager who insists that Colorado Springs is populated by nothing but conservatives and easily-offended Luddites.
One of the ideas which could come up at Monday’s meeting will be the popular local news show Western Skies. Some thought by the recent funding disinformation circulated by KRCC, that Western Skies is on the chopping block. Nothing could be further from the truth, as attested by Colorado College president Dick Celeste’s letters to both the Gazette and the Independent. Western Skies puts together a half-hour news show twice a week. It’s very popular. Let’s hear how many of you like Western Skies! Well why not have that show on every day? Can you imagine the kind of coverage we could get for local happenings, local non-profit efforts, partisan efforts, even locally owned businesses, if we had local news on a daily basis? Let’s hear how many of you would favor that idea!
Okay, so I’m here tonight to ask you to bring that voice to the meeting on Monday. Colorado College is looking to see how serious we are about speaking as a community. We’ve got to show them on Monday night.
Let me just say that I believe that the political battle begins with the media. We’ve got to reclaim the media if we are to achieve even a portion of our political goals this year, or ever. And by political goals, I’m talking about saving our country of course, about an agenda to tackle social inequality, to provide a safety net, to save our civil rights, to rescue really is what I mean, to rescue our right to elect a government which represents us. All those things. We are not going to win on those issues if we cannot take our case to the American people. It doesn’t matter how much money we raise to pay the media to carry our message, if the media wants to spin our message in the favor of its owners, of the upper business corporate class, there’s nothing of our message that is going to get through to the people.
A friend of mine was telling me tonight, she’s not very political. She doesn’t see much point to political parties. They’re divisive she says. She would prefer that politicians would brush aside political affiliations and sit down together to work out solutions for the American people.
Now you being fairly active, or activated, political Democrats probably see the naivety of her argument. Let me explain why I think she’s being idealistic and I’d like to see if you agree with me.
If politicians were civil servants indeed sitting down to work out solutions, that would be one thing. But we know that’s not the case. With the division of Republicans and Democrats are two groups sitting down, one of whom has their hands at the levers, making the trouble, and the other side, our side, is trying to undo it. Am I right on this point? The Republican, let’s call them the corporate cheap-labor, landowner party is trying to get away with whatever it can, and the Democratic party is left to try to to fight for the diminishing power of the rest of the world’s population. Is that right? Do I have that right?
Now accusations can be made that a number of the Democrats are fighting on the side of the landowners. And frankly I believe it. I know just enough about how politics does not work, to ask the silly question, can’t we get rid of those Democrats? Can’t we just expel them? Let ’em be Republicans if they want to so badly. We don’t need to be putting our grassroots efforts into backing their turncoat behavior. Anyway, that’s my opinion. I feel that way about torture, about the war, about health care, about the environment, about civil rights, about judicial review and the balance of power keeping the executive branch from acting like a dictatorship.
Now I will assert that we need a media which will reflect this battle for what it is. If we want to preserve this democracy, we have to have a democracy. We have to reach the American public, and we need to reach them with a level, balanced message.
I’ve spoken passionately, but you know that I haven’t spoken out of line, I haven’t exaggerated the situation, have I? Have I? I believe I’ve represented an objective concern for where this country is going. We need a media which will do that.
We have to reclaim this media, and we can start with the only place we have even a toehold and that’s public radio. Please come on Monday night to speak out for the reform we need. The airwaves belong to us. They’re like the public libraries, like the public lands set aside to preserve -in England they’re called the Public Trust. The public airwaves belong to us, and they need to speak for us. Please come!
Thank you!
It’s finally here! The Camp Casey TAKING THE FUN OUT OF WAR baseball cap. Be part of our team, if only from the comfort of your warm living room! You can buy it online at the Camp Casey.info website. All proceeds benefit the effort to stop the war.
CAMP CASEY COLORADO SPRINGS
Waiting in line at the Post Office the other day I overheard a local advertisement on the radio encouraging the usual holiday splurge “because you’ve been good this year!”
I thought to myself, who among Americans can say they’ve been good this year?
We’ve all of us, by our acquiescence, permitted the prosecution of an illegal occupation of a sovereign nation. We’ve overseen the slaughter of thousands, we’ve accepted large levels of collateral damage, we’ve sanctioned and justified the use of torture, in our name.
Outside of war, we’ve continued to abide the exploitation of child labor, prison labor, slave labor and poverty. We participated in the destruction of the natural world, in sexual exploitation and genocide. We’ve watched the suffering of fellow human beings, and permitted further suffering outside the view of our cameras.
Do we take responsibility for these offenses or not? Let’s at least concede this is not the year to say that we’ve been good.
To my friends who’ve spoken out, we may or may not have done our best, but let’s keep at it. Merry Christmas!
To those who didn’t feel the urge, or thought there was nothing that could be done: may the spirit of Christmas, of peace and goodwill inspire you.
For holiday cheer, I offer these amusements:
– Kurt Vonnegut’s dissection of our current leadership
– The War-on-Christmas canard scuttled [warning: profanity]
– The NEOCONS in pictures and song [one profanity, repeated]
– My Best-of-2005 collection.
Cheers,
Eric
I joked that the distance was so short from Camp Casey to the Colorado College administration office, we could do it on our knees. Sooner than think it through, we did it.
This week some colleagues and I marched on our knees to the Colorado College president’s office to present signed petitions which asked that the college radio station carry a news program called DEMOCRACY NOW! (Exclamation theirs.) We’ve yet to receive a reply, but I wanted to explain our actions.
First of all, what is DEMOCRACY NOW? DN is a daily radio and television news show out of New York City that stands nearly alone in covering the stories which are being kept out of the corporate owned media. For example, every year the Colorado Springs Independent covers the year’s ten most censored stories. DN reports those and more, usually as they happen.
Do you know the story of Khaled al-Masri, the German Muslim who is currently being represented by the ACLU in a lawsuit against the CIA, for unlawful abduction, rendition, incarceration and torture? DN reported his story a year ago, after al-Masri found himself freshly drugged and dropped into a field in Macedonia. His story sounded so strange but had the ring of truth to it. Experts were planning to analyze strands of his hair to verify his account. It took more than a year before al-Masri was able to break national news. In between, how many extra-judicial abductions have been allowed to take place?
And the recent attention paid to the U.S. use of Napalm, and their use of White Phosphor as a chemical weapon? DN reported such incidences from the very first day the U.S. assault began.
Why KRCC? Because local community radio station is our great hope, and our first impediment.
By now it is widely accepted that FOX and the network media are mouthpieces for corporate moneyed interests. People of education turn to NPR and the NYT for example for what they believe is the balanced picture. But it’s not, and critical thinkers are beginning to see that the media has been playing a good cop bad cop psych-op routine. One side of the media plays the good cop, with its supposed liberal bias, but ultimately has the same agenda as its partner.
The local community looks to KRCC as a trusted advocate of objective news. But a growing number who supplement their news from the internet and from the Indy see that NPR really doesn’t cut it anymore. Have you heard NPR advancing the “Christmas” vs “holiday” war-on-Christmas canard? Elsewhere this story has been exposed as a concoction of the far right, but NPR is dutifully giving it legs.
Why go to the president of CC? Because KRCC station manager Mario Valdes has repeatedly rebuked everyone’s requests. Community members have been after him for years and his reply has been the same. Mr. Valdes has even slandered the effort by categorizing it as a small minority who want a political bias on KRCC. No one is asking for bias, just objectivity. And the number of people who’ve made this request has not been small. And it’s always been growing.
Plenty of public radio stations have adopted DN and can provide wonderful testimonies. They testify that DN beats out Morning Edition and All Things Considered in popularity. In some cases DN is their leading fund-raiser. While it might be hard right now to mount a large rally in front of the station to advocate for this change, it’s clear that if KRCC carried DN, and then threatened to take it away, crowds would protest en mass.
What next? Give station manager Mario Valdes the chance to argue for what values he stands when he opposes DEMOCRACY NOW. Let’s hear beyond the arguments which NPR advances to try to stem their eroding control over their affiliates. NPR has always fought the intrusion of a spoiler like DN in their line-up because it significantly hampers their editorial discretion.
Let’s schedule a townhall meeting, a public debate. To make it interesting public viewing, let’s make it a tag team debate. If Mr. Valdes is so concerned that Colorado Springs is such an uneducated community, too easily put off by issues of social justice and human rights, let’s cater to his mythical plebeian audience. The debate can be tag team, open to all, WWF rules!
Mr. Valdes will then get to see just how small is the group of DN advocates. As we’ll see how many people share Mr Valdes’ opinion against more objectivity on KRCC. Mr Valdes may bring the support and sympathy of many listeners, but how many will stand up next to him to argue against freedom of the press, Democracy Now’s many prestigious journalism awards, and the growing movement to reclaim the airwaves for the people?
Holiday season event, date to be announced.
When we dismantled the 1900 CROSS IRAQ WAR MEMORIAL on October 13, we recited the names of all the US soldiers killed in the war in Iraq. Recalling the recitation of the American names, CAMP CASEY will next attempt to memorialize the people of Iraq who lost their lives.
This remembrance performance will require a chorus of at least twelve people, half male, half female, half of each of them children. A larger group can certainly be accomodated, as long as the make-up remains three parts men, three parts women, three parts boys, three parts girls.
As a lead vocalist reads the first names from the official list of US casualties, the chorus will punctuate each American name with a rythmic chant of Islamic first names to represent the Iraqi dead. Each member of the chorus will be assigned a set of four Islamic names, appropriate to their gender.
Between each American name, the chorus of twelve people will simultaneously chant four names in quick succession:
“Abdallah, Saleh, Sabah, Jabbar.”
“Qasem, Ahmad, Ali, Nusseir.”
“Yahya, Yaseen, Khaled, Ammar.”
“Ziyad, Taha, Nayef, Munther.”
“Hameed, Salah, Leith, Wahhab.”
“Mushtaq, Riyad, Basem, Mahdi.”
“Aziz, Nafe, Omar, Shiya.”
“Hussein, Dia, Jalal, Abbas.”
One man and one boy would voice a base rhythm of “Mohammad, Mohammad, Mohammad, Mohammad.”
The effect will be to have 48 Iraqi names called out for every American name, two thousand times.
Instead of coffins, let’s reflect upon the returning U.S. corpses at an earlier stage, in their body bags.
Instead of uniform boxes, we’ll sample the various sizes of body bags used, dependent upon what remained of the lost soldier. IED, mortar,fire.
Instead of names, we’ll mark each variant bag with a likely cause of death, and the corresponding number of fatalities for each.
Instead of limiting ourselves to those soldiers lost in Iraq, we’ll mark those lost -and to be lost- who’ve already returned home.
A hospital bed will mark those lost to Depleted Uranium or Anthrax. A bottle will mark those lost to alcoholism. Etc.
George W. is a war criminal, Dick Cheney is a war criminal, Colin Powell is a war criminal, every last White House staffer is a war criminal, nearly every Congress member is a war criminal, every mainstream media pundit is a war criminal, and YOU are a war criminal for permitting their illegal war in your name. “Not in our name” you decry? Did you stop it?
No one in the world could have stopped the American onslaught except the American people. No one on the other side of our tanks and our missiles can stop the American military machine. Neither their sovereign borders nor their laws can protect them from falling into our gunsights. Only the American people have recourse through their constitution to bring an aggressive rogue government to heel.
After the last election, thousands of American contributed photos of themselves to a website offering their apologies to the rest of the world. “We’re sorry” was the theme. Many of them added “we did what we could.”
A European website quickly emerged with thousands of world citizens turning up in photographs of their own to say “apology accepted.” That was very gracious of them. Do Americans have any idea what it will really take to stop this administration? When will we really be able to say we did our best?
You can purchase WAR CRIMINAL t-shirts at the IraqWarMemorial.info website.
A box. Sunken in the earth. Like the foundation of an unfinished house.
Borrowing from Maya Lin’s Vietnam Wall obviously, this memorial foundation would be at the base of a hill. Preferably in te shadow of a hill. Looking up at the north slope with the sun beyond the hill.
On one wall, the thousand US casualties of the war.
On the next wall, blank space reserved for the next thousand who will die before we can extricate ourselves from Iraq. Without abandoning the Iraqi population.
Now it occurs to me that I’ve left out the casualties of the first Gulf War. The many who served in that conflict and have since died of causes related to their service. We’ll have to find a suitable memorial for them.
In the corner between the two walls already described will sit a small replica of Rodin’s THINKER. He’ll be seated on a stool and he’ll wear a dunce cap emblazoned with the logos of the corporate profiteers and media war mongers.
On the other two walls which rise against the hill -which rise higher and together in the fashion of the twin towers of the WTC perhaps- here will be engraved with the names of each Iraqi citizen casualty. Fifteen thousand names, many thousand whose names we neglected to record, and about which few relatives or friends remain to give testament. Those could each be listed as “Sovereign Citizen of Iraq.”
