April 17-19, 2010: Converge on Washington, DC

[IndianaGreen]

April 17-19, 2010: Converge on Washington, DC

Join SOA Watch in Washington, DC, hold your Member of Congress accountable and speak out for justice and human rights.

The SOA Watch Lobby Days will kick-off on Saturday, April 17 at 6:30 pm with a social gathering. This will be a chance for SOA Watch activists to get to know each other and to gear up for the Spring Event.

On Sunday, April 18, there'll be an anti-oppression training in the morning (click here to register), a teach-in in the afternoon and a panel in the evening. The teach-in and the panel will draw the connections between the School of the Americas, torture, immigration and the seven bases in Colombia at which the Pentagon is planning to deploy U.S. soldiers. A grassroots lobby training to equip us with the tools necessary to get our message across to close the SOA, and a gathering for young organizers will also take place in the afternoon of Sunday, April 18.

Click here for a schedule of events.

In our work to close the School of the Americas (SOA) and to change oppressive U.S. foreign policy, SOA Watch is recognizing the SOA as part of a tradition and system of white supremacy, to name just one form of oppression. The purpose of the school is to extend U.S. hegemony in the Americas, as well as to maintain forms and institutions of racial, gender, class domination, and other oppressions over the populations of the Western Hemisphere. Working for justice for the people of the Americas in a principled way means that we have to address oppressions, both as they affect U.S. foreign policy and society and the movement to close the School of the Americas.

http://soaw.org/index.php

[AnnieBW]

1. Have fun fighting with the gun nuts and teabaggers!

Because April 19th is a perfect day to protest the government!

[IndianaGreen]

2. Our government is teaching torture and assassination to future death squad leaders

whose job will be to preserve the influence of the Latin American elites, and the corporations that line their pockets.

[Doctor_J]

3. And by marching with the teabaggers, you will become one of them

[IndianaGreen]

4. By endorsing Obama's assassination policies, you become one of them

As Chris Floyd wrote recently:

Let us hear no more excuses for Barack Obama. Let us hear no more defenses, no more special pleading, no more extenuations. Let us have no more reciting of the "pressures" he is under, of the "many obstacles" that balk him in his quest to do us good, of the "bad advisors" who are swaying him to unworthy acts against his will. Let us be done at last with all these wretched lies, these complicitous self-deceptions that are facilitating atrocity and tyranny on a monstrous scale.

Barack Obama has ordered the murder of an American citizen, without trial, without due process, without the production of any evidence. All it takes to kill any American citizen in this way is Barack Obama's signature on a piece of paper, his arbitrary designation of the target as a "suspected terrorist." In precisely the same way -- precisely the same way -- Josef Stalin would place a mark by a name in a list of "suspected terrorists" or "counterrevolutionaries," and the bearer of that name would die. This is the system we have now, the same as the Soviets had then: a leader with the unchallengeable power to kill citizens without due process.

That this power has not been used on the same scale in the American system as in the Stalinist state -- yet -- does not alter the equivalence of this governing principle. In both cases, the leader signs arbitrary death warrants; the security services carry out the task; and the 'great and good' of society accept this draconian power as necessary and right.

This is what you support when you support Barack Obama. It does not matter if you think his opponents in the factional infighting to control a bloodsoaked empire and its war machine are "worse" than he is in some measure. When you support him, when you defend him, when you excuse him, it is arbitrary murder that you are supporting. It is the absolute negation of every single principle of enlightenment and human rights professed by liberals, progressives -- indeed, by honorable people of every political stripe -- for centuries.

There is nothing particularly remarkable about Obama's order to kill an American citizen without trial or evidence, of course. George W. Bush claimed the same powers. As I have noted here and elsewhere for many years, our American presidents now claim the right to kill any person on earth whom they arbitrarily designate as an enemy -- or even a suspected enemy -- of the United States. Barack Obama embraced this power as soon as he took office, ordering a "surge" in the "targeted killings" on "suspected terrorists" in Pakistan. Hundreds and hundreds of innocent human beings have been murdered in these drone attacks; many thousands more have been driven from their homes, and terrorized into lives of mental anguish, their psyches lamed by trauma, upheaval and the ever-present dread of death raining down on them from the skies.

http://www.chris-floyd.com/component/content/article/1-latest-news/1953-the-accomodationists-memo-to-liberals-on-the-white-house-death-warrants.html

[AnnieBW]

5. I'm not endorsing the School of the Americas

I'm just saying that you guys could have picked a better date to protest.

[IndianaGreen]

6. There is a demonstration of some sort in DC every day

and unlike Democratic politicians, we won't let the rightwing dictate to us what we do, or when we do it.

[Doctor_J]

7. But your protest will be overwhelmed by the gun nuts and Limbeciles

at beat. Worst case, ConNN will include you to their numbers.