Talaam Acey: "True Lies"

Apropos of April being national poetry month, here's that Talaam Acey feller.

More from The Real News and Winter Soldiers

Winter Soldiers: Clifton Hicks and Steven Casey

The Real News main site, and their Youtube channel.

15 mar 2008

testimony from "Winter Soldier"(more here)

As you may already know, the A.N.S.W.E.R. coalition had a large demonstration scheduled for the mall in DC for this weekend, to commemorate and protest the fifth anniversary of the Iraq invasion, which they discuss here(see below, from their bulletin):

Regarding the March 15, 2008
Fifth Anniversary Mass March on Washington DC:
In December, the ANSWER Coalition sent out an email that contained an announcement from the Year5 Coalition (that included 17 anti-war organizations) about plans for a mass demonstration in Washington DC on March 15, 2008.

This announcement was the culmination of several national meetings hosted by Cindy Sheehan. The purpose of the Year5 Coalition was to create the maximum unity between many anti-war coalitions and organizations so as to mobilize a huge outpouring of the people in Washington DC on the fifth anniversary of the start of this criminal war and occupation.

The ANSWER Coalition was committed to doing everything in its power to support the effort to unify the movement for a massive mobilization. The fifth anniversary is a critical time and will be marked by protests around the world. Saturday March 15 was chosen for a huge march on Washington because the following weekend is Easter weekend and it was considered much more difficult to bring people from all over the country to DC.

Not all anti-war groups concurred that it was a good idea to carry out a mass march in DC on the 5th anniversary. That was the stated position of UFPJ for instance. But 17 organizations did issue a call for the March 15 national march in Washington DC. The day following the announcement by the Year5 Coalition a public letter was sent and circulated by the Iraq Veterans Against the War (IVAW) asking that there be no national mass march in DC or any protests at all in DC against the war from Thursday March 13 through the weekend ending Sunday March 16. The IVAW explained that it was planning its own event called Winter Soldier (that will take place in a DC suburb in Maryland.) Winter Soldier is an indoor event that will feature the live testimony from Iraq veterans and others about war crimes committed in Iraq. IVAW asked that there be no mass march during their four days of testimony.

Is this tactically astute? I don't know. I wonder, just as I wondered if the real reason the ANSWER people called off the march was because they were afraid that with the increased restrictions the government has instituted on demonstrations at the mall, the demonstration would either turn counterproductively tepid, or violent, and the request of the Winter Soldier group merely gave them cover. Besides, why should the Winter Soldier group insist that there be no march? The corporate media tends to downplay the marches as much as they can anyway, and they might have even given "Winter Soldier" more coverage as an example of "well-behaved" protest as a counter-example, if they just waited and had their events after the A.N.S.W.E.R. protest. Who knows?

I haven't been to a protest march, but I wonder if a lot of the people who put them down do so because they've never participated in one. As far as the question of whether or not protests are effective, I wish I knew a way to measure this objectively-- I am agnostic about it myself. Davis Fleetwood has some thoughts about protests, here, apropo of the 9.15.2007 protest[video].

Wexler, Cheney, this and that: 12.20.2007

1.Wexler and company now have over 100,000 signatures for their impeach let's-have-hearings-regarding Cheney website(previously discussed here.) In spite of the (substantial)skepticism I feel regarding whether such gestures as signing an internet petition actually worth a tinker's dam to characters like Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi, I recognize that it's that same skepticism that leads some people to support "viable" candidates like HRC and other ostensible progressives who are just kinder, gentler war boosters.

Nevertheless, signing an internet petition isn't the same as supporting phoney-baloney liberals with votes and money, so there's something to be said for signing them, as long as you don't allow yourself to be suckered by a broader-- and mostly false-- sense of optimism about the democratic party as a whole.

I'd like to revisit this topic later- actually I think it's two topics:

1.How can one be a liberal when the figureheads of liberalism*, generally speaking, aren't particularly liberal?

(*I would say "progressive," which for better or worse is presently trendier, but the word has begun to bug me as it's begun to have a "better-management-of-failed-policies" stink about it of late. Call it not wanting to belong to a club that would have someone like Joe Biden as a member, to paraphrase Groucho Marx. Liberalism.)

2. How do you explain to ordinary, non-wonkish people why, to so many of us,** "The Left is the New Right"? (And definitely not in a good way.)

A lot of decent, reasonably smart people who mean well and don't necessarily want the US to be a bloodthirsty empire only understand things in terms dictated by CNN and their ilk, and think someone like Mike Gravel or Dennis Kucinich is too liberal, as if everything political could be measured on a simple two-dimensional continuum, but if you ask them what "too liberal" means they either don't have a clue or only understand the concept in terms of assertions they've heard regularly spouting out of deliberately ignorant big-media loudmouths like Glenn Beck or Sean Hannity.


(**Maybe it goes without saying, but even though I tend to identify certain bloggers and others as being part of an informal association of like-minded persons who look at it this way, I will only presume to speak for myself. Maybe I should just wish that Arthur Silber might tackle a general field theory of why the left is the new right, as I imagine he'd do it ten or twenty times better than I could-- but to paraphrase Rob Payne's friend Charlie Parker, I will light my fire, set up my skillet and see what I can cook up with this weekend.)

Sibel Edmonds, the motion picture

"KILL THE MESSENGER - UNE FEMME A ABATTRE"

via Lukery: "The Sibel Edmonds case: the real culprits of 9.11"

Much as I hate to say it, but this promotional trailer seems a bit too slick to me, making Sibel Edmonds come across more like a Hollywood diva playing a real-life whistleblower than a real person.

I hope this just a symptom of some unfortunate editing choices and not a reflection of someone who started out as earnest but who has since acquired an inflated sense of self-importance. Don't get me wrong-- Sibel Edmonds' experiences working for the government, and her subsequent struggles are important-- it's just that she doesn't do her cause any justice if she has since become pompously self-righteous in her presentational style.

Sibel Edmonds' official site, Just a Citizen

Sept15.org, pt 2

War of Words: Protestors take on Iraq war

one of my correspondents informs me that even the AP is getting into the video hosting thing now, albeit via www.livevideo.com. (The picture quality is better at the link above, but it's too large to fit on this template without compressing the image.)

also, here are some Youtube links to videos of the demonstration. I almost went but had an unexpected obligation I couldn't wriggle out of.

(8.32; this one shows a lot of back-and-forth between "gathering of eagles" and some of the antiwar protesters.)

(1:44; essentially a shorter version of the 8:32 clip, with the emphasis on the more obnoxious persons and none of the humor of the previous clip.)

(7:01; a vid by the war supporters .)

(back to the lefties:9:54;pt 1)

(3:31; pt 2 from the same guy, above.)

(5:22; Cindy Sheehan--unfortunately this is a very poor quality video.)