Michigan Peace Network

Announcements:

Make the MPN Website work for your organization

A primary goal of the Michigan Peace Network (MPN) is to help coordinate statewide activity. The Action Options Tool was adopted by the Network in order to garner virtual shows-of-hands by its members on particular ideas and actions that have potential for statewide coordination. By supporting, or not supporting, campaign themes on the grid, peace and justice organizations in the state will have interactively-built consensus around large projects. Go to the Actions page to view the proposed actions and to get ideas for your own group's activities.

Designated administrators of local peace groups can input actions and votes to the Action Options page and use other tools on the site. These include the Announcements section, which puts items on the home page; the Resource section, for longer articles and resources; the Boycott and the Petition sites; and the Forum bulletin board, where items on the action grid and other issues can be discussed. Articles and actions from 2006 and 2007 have been archived under Resources.

Another feature of the MPN website is the Calendar page, where local and regional peace and justice events can be posted. Contact Michigan volunteer facilitator Rosalie Riegle at riegle@svsu.edu for site training and any questions.

Posted on 2/18/08 by Rosalie640

People's State of the Union Video

Michigan Peaceworks put together a video to counter President Bush's State of the Union. You can watch it here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dnrnsBFH2ZY

If you want to be a part of this project, send in your picture and a brief statement on What's Your National Priority this year? to michiganpeaceworks@gmail.com.

Posted on 1/30/08 by JoelMPW

Coast Guard withdraws Great Lakes live fire plans

Great News! Thanks to those in Michigan, Illinois, Minnesota, Ohio and elsewhere for helping bring about this victory by signing the petition and otherwise lobbying against the Coast Guard proposal.

"The U.S. Coast Guard, responding to safety and environmental concerns, said Monday it was withdrawing plans to periodically close 2,500 square miles of the Great Lakes for live machine-gun firing exercises. The plan had been criticized by several U.S. and Canadian mayors, business leaders and environmentalists who said it could be unsafe and disruptive. Environmentalists also said they worried about the consequences of lead ammunition being deposited in the Great Lakes."
Read more: http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/illinois/chi-ap-il-greatlakesgunfire,0,1779293,print.story

War cannot be humanized. It can only be abolished.

History is not only a chronicle “of things inflicted on us by the powers that be." History is also a chronicle of resistance, "a history of people who endure tyranny for decades, but who ultimately rise up and overthrow the dictator. We’ve seen this in country after country, surprise after surprise. Rulers who seem to have total control, they suddenly wake up one day, and there are a million people in the streets, and they pack up and leave. This has happened in the Philippines, in Yemen, all over, in Nepal. Million people in the streets, and then the ruler has to get out of the way. So, this is what we’re aiming for in this country.

"Everything we do is important. Every little thing we do, every picket line we walk on, every letter we write, every act of civil disobedience we engage in, any recruiter that we talk to, any parent that we talk to, any GI that we talk to, any young person that we talk to, ... everything we do in the direction of a different world is important, even though at the moment [these actions] seem futile, because that’s how change comes about. Change comes about when millions of people do little things, which at certain points in history come together, and then something good and something important happens." Read more: http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=06/11/24/1442258

It's Up to Us!

View MPN Petition, Action & Event Digest Nov 21 - Dec 2 here: http://wearemichigan.com/mpn/digestnov21

"Torture is a noxious, heinous practice and should not be tolerated. Slavery was once legal and tolerated in the U.S. (it is still practiced in some parts of the world). But people fought back, organized and formed the abolition movement. Pioneering legal and human-rights organizations, such as CCR, aggressively and creatively are working to stop torture, and to hold the torturers and their superiors accountable. Ultimately, it will be the U.S. populace--not the German courts, not the U.S. Congress--that stops the U.S. torture program."
Read more from Amy Goodman: http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/opinion/293201_amy22.html

The Military Commissions Act

MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann addresses the Torture Act (aka, the Military Commissions Act) and the national yawn over our evaporating rights. Constitutional law scholar (and hero) Jonathan Turley provides crucial insight. Click here for the video stream and transcript:
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/printer_101906L.shtml

* * * * *
The October 17th signing of the Military Commissions Act of 2006—a so-called “compromise” bill whose principle compromise is to human rights—grants the unitary executive office unprecedented legal leeway in holding and trying (alleged) Al Quaeda suspects for war crimes before special military tribunals.

These tribunals have been called Gulag courts by Human Rights Watch. Perhaps as aptly they are understood in terms of the surreal world imagined in Kafka’s fiction in which unlocatable forces—punitive bureaucratic authority coupled with punitive intimate authority—congeal to produce a state of rational panic on the part of the individual subjected to them. Such are the circumstance endured by detainees who are not given basic information about charges against them and who are subjected to euphemistically named “enhanced interrogation techniques.”

A summary of the consequences of the Torture Bill:

• suspected Al Qaeda detainees at Guantánamo Bay may not file habeas corpus challenges in US courts
• the Supreme Court (and other federal courts) are retroactively stripped of jurisdiction to hear habeas corpus challenges filed by Guantánamo detainees
• defendants on trial before military commissions are not allowed to attend their entire trial and confront all evidence used against them
• affirms that conspiracy is a war crime and can be the basis of a trial before a military commission operating under the Law of War
• narrows the applicability of Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions to Al Qaeda suspects, the provision that stipulates a base line of human rights protections for detainees
• retroactively protects US officials who engaged in enhanced interrogation techniques, such as simulated drowning, induced hypothermia and stress tests
• does not address accountability for current, future or retroactive cases of privately contracted, non-US-personnel interrogation abuses at Abu Ghraib. CACI International, Inc. provided more than half the analysts and interrogators at Abu Ghraib. At this date, none of the CACI contractors or their corporate sponsors have been held accountable; many low level US personnel have taken the fall.

The moral consequences of the bill’s authorization are as damning as the legal consequences. If the UN Declaration of Human Rights, the Geneva Conventions and federal statutes against torture stipulate categorically that torture is, in no exception, justified; the authors of the Military Commissions Act have rendered as a matter of relativist semantics that absolute moral imperative. That is, it has provided legal sanction for—in Rumsfeld’s immemorial words—the “take the gloves off” policy that has been unofficial practice since the infamous “Torture memo.”

To counter the perception of abusive power, administration linguists aimed to conceptually distinguish techniques that “shock the conscience” from ostensibly professional “procedures;” and to obscure the basic truth that “alternative interrogation techniques,” no matter what you call them, are nevertheless illegal according to the international treaties to which the US is party.


SOURCES
Will the Supreme Court shackle new tribunal law?
Warren Richey, The Christian Science Monitor, October 17, 2006
http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/1017/p01s02-usju.html

Torture’s Easy Embrace
Geoffrey Nunberg, Tompaine.com, October 13, 2006
http://www.tompaine.com/print/tortures_easy_embrace.php

War Profiteers: Profits Over Patriotism in Iraq
Robert Borosage, et al, Campaign for America’s Future, September 2006
http://home.ourfuture.org/reports/report-war-profiteers.pdf

You Can Do Anything with a Bayonet Except Sit on It
Tom Engelhardt interviews Mark Danner, Tomdispatch.com, February 26, 2006
http://www.tomdispatch.com/indexprint.mhtml?pid=63903
Danner is author of Torture and Truth: America, Abu Ghraib and the War on Terror.

Captors instructed to 'take gloves off’ while questioning
Richard Serrano, Los Angeles Times, June 9, 2004
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2004/06/09/MNGUG737901.DTL

GovTrack (congressional voting record)
http://www.govtrack.us/congress/vote.xpd?vote=s2006-259

Military Families Speak Out Post Card to Congress

Take a moment to download this postcard from Military Families Speak Out – Michigan Chapter – and send it to your congresspersons!

"Every day that you fail to take action to end the war in Iraq, an average of two more US troops and countless Iraqis die. Whose names are you willing to add to the growing list of casualties?"

For more information: http://www.mfsomichigan.org/MFSOPostcard.pdf