Debra Sweet: Doing All We Can to Repudiate the Bush Program

.Debra Sweet, Director

Presentation at World Can’t Wait National Meeting May 3, 2008

About six
weeks ago, Bush got approval and funding from the Congress for a secret
directive authorizing a range of operations, including assassinations, against
the Iranian government. According to
Andrew Cockburn on May 2, the area “covers actions across a huge geographic
area – from Lebanon to Afghanistan – but is also far more sweeping in the type
of actions permitted under its guidelines – up to and including the
assassination of targeted officials” A Marine amphibious force, originally
due to leave San Diego for the Persian Gulf in mid June, has had its sailing
date abruptly moved up to May 4.” That’s
tomorrow. It”ll take them about a month
to get there.

This
preparation is real, the threat of a new attack must be taken extremely
seriously – and there is NO opposition to this coming from within the halls of
power or from the democratic presidential contenders. Hillary has officially threatened to “totally
obliterate” Iran
and Obama’s only objection was that “using words like obliterate doesn’t actually
produce good results” I think the Iranians can be confident that I [too] will
respond forcefully.” Vanity Fair wrote a month ago that the only thing standing
between the US and an attack
on Iran
was General Fallon – and just days later he was forced to resign

World Can’t Wait Plans in 5 key areas:

1. Step up our efforts to prevent an attack by the Bush regime on Iran.

We think of 71 million people, a huge portion of
them under thirty years old, sitting in the cross hairs of a military commanded
by someone who believes he’s on a mission from God. We have to take responsibility to prevent an attack on Iran, and if it
does happen, to send a message to the world that we oppose it. Specific plans:

Hold meetings and forums
everywhere schools are still in session this month.
Organize Emergency response
networks to act in case of a US
bombing of Iran.
Get out a basic fact sheet
which the whole movement can use.
Promote the film “Iran Is Not
the Problem .”
Spread the model of the
Chicago City Council resolution against the US
attacking Iran.

Above
all, let no one say that we stood by wondering why and how to act.

2. Plan Protests at the Democratic National
Convention August 25-29 Denver

What if people came forward and put out a political
pole in opposition to the Democratic convention in August? What if THIS was the new terms of
things? The Democratic nominee in 2008
will not speak for us. We have to
challenge their accommodation to the Bush program.

World Can’t Wait is endorsing the ReCreate 68
coalition, and forming our own working group for Denver.

3. Join the Battle
to get John Yoo Fired, Disbarred and Prosecuted for the Torture Memos as a
way of stopping the TORTUREState:

We are joining the demand made by The National
Lawyers Guild that John C. Yoo be fired from UC Berkeley’s Boalt Hall law
school, disbarred from the practice of law, and prosecuted for war crimes. John
Yoo is a war criminal. This isn’t about Berkeley-it’s about humanity. Specifically World Can’t Wait is:

Working with the NLG and representatives of other
groups and professors in Berkeley
to make it a hotbed of protest against torture, holding programs, protests, and
giving many ways for people to weigh in so that a different standard is set in society, and especially at the law
school.
Organizing a campaign of letters and statements
aimed at the UC administration, taking the battle to other law schools and the
one million lawyers in the U.S.,
as well as to the wider public through a billboard in Berkeley, mass postcard distribution at law
schools, film showings and letters to the editor at law journals and in
newspapers.

4. STOP Military RECRUITMENT

World Can’t Wait believes the slogan “Support the troops” does much
damage, and that the war can’t be
stopped if we place more value on American lives than Iraqi
lives. As the protesters in Berkeley ask, “What are
they recruiting FOR?” The troops are
being recruited into an institution waging an unjust war, trained and ordered
to carry out war crimes. Everyone in the
US
military has the responsibility to decide where they stand, just as Americans
do when their government is waging an unjust war, and refuse to commit such
crimes.

Youth have started
self-organizing protests at military recruiting offices in response to hearing
about the battle to close down the Marine recruiters in Berkeley.
We will help others spread this, while keeping focus on Berkeley.

5. Declare it Now! Spread the Resistance – Wear Orange Daily.

Orange has become widely identified
with opposition to torture and the Bush regime.
In all our actions, and daily, we will look for ways to make this
sentiment visible, including working with performers and people of conscience
who wear orange publicly as a way of encouraging millions to do so.

Presentation to World Can’t Wait National Meeting 5-3-08

The Bush
program is still shaping the world – and everything they have put in place for
the last seven years is what is setting the stage and the terms for all of
official politics today.

As we said in January, “George Bush is
unrelenting in his determination to drive the savageness of his agenda into the
next administration”. Politics as usual
will not meet the enormity of the damage that has been done. Can the world wait? Hell, no!
And do we still need to bring to a halt this whole program and
direction? Hell, YES!

This is a time for moral clarity and fearless
determination. The horrors that we came
together to stop are not over – and we can’t be over either.

We need to come out of this meeting with
strategic thinking and strategic plans to bring this whole direction to a
halt. We need to sound the alarm and mobilize people to
act decisively against an attack on Iran. We have proposals to discuss,
new people to hear from, and decisions to make.

In the 7 “Your Government” statements in Our Call
to Drive Out the Bush regime, we correctly identified the trajectory the regime
was headed on. If anything, it’s gone
further than many who signed our Call expected.

The Democrats have been
accomplices in much of this, from voting in their majority for every single
fund request from Bush to kill Iraqi civilians, re-authorizing the USA PATRIOT
Act, passing the Military Commissions Act which stripped habeas corpus and
legalized torture, to approving two Supreme Court justices who have already tipped
the Supreme Court further in favor of corporate rights over persons, white
supremacy over the goal of desegregation, and upheld the first ban on
abortion.

World Can’t Wait doesn’t have a position against voting,
and we know many supporters will vote for Democrats, third parties and
independents, in the hope of change.
Some of those candidates, if they won the presidency, would have
different policies. But
lets be scientific about this — none of us, including the candidates — has
any idea who is going to be selected in November. It is wrong to assume that a Democrat is
going to follow Bush as president.

And even if it did, the 2008 Democratic nominee will not
speak for us. The Democrats” track
record for the last seven years – and the actual platforms of those running for
president – make clear that the basic direction set under Bush is not going
away unless it is stopped by the people, through massive political resistance,
through society-wide disaffection, and through a historic struggle to change
the course of history. This is why we
came together. This remains true
today. And, perhaps contrary to surface
appearances and cynical assumptions, this is still eminently possible.

Which
party just presided over passing the BIGGEST military budget EVER?

The
fourth vote for funding the Iraq
occupation since the Democrats have controlled Congress. Nancy Pelosi
got guns for butter. She put the screws to the Out of Iraq Caucus,
and got the votes for the war because she threw in a little health care
for veterans,
and promised to employ people, giving Bush more money than he even
asked for.

How is
this any better than what Hitler did? He
gave the veterans and unemployed people work when the economy was terrible, and
they went along with him. No, fighting
for healthcare today is NOT opposition to an unjust and genocidal occupation –
stopping this war is still on US.

And how the hell did Clinton’s threat to obliterate Iran get over? She actually said that Iran should know we could “totally
obliterate them.” This is the kind of
thing that should call forward massive protests, outraged walk-outs, and vocal
repudiation by many in the public sphere.
The fact that this didn’t happen says a lot about what we must
transform.

Elaine Brower and I were reading
the transcript of the last Clinton-Obama debate in Pennsylvania, called the “compassion
forum”. She wrote me, “What a load of shit. What
does “walk the walk of faith” have to do with being president? This is a
huge disaster and a problem. We must address this somehow. How do
you use the word “obliterate” on one day and then use faith, religion and God
on the other and get away with it? Or maybe it DOES GO HAND IN HAND, and
we have identified for real the new crusades.”

Obama says the US has to keep the “strongest military in the
world,” and his campaign acknowledges that he would have to increase the
numbers of private contractors like Blackwater in Iraq
to do so, and add 100,000 troops to the U.S. military. The 1996 Solomon Amendment, which both Obama
and Clinton recently voiced upport of, provides for the Secretary of Defense to
deny federal funding to institutions of higher learning if they prohibit or
prevent ROTC or military recruitment on campus. That’s the kind of politics
being defined by and allowed by the political process. These politics are about suppressing any
actions of the people that might meaningfully stop this war. But the Vermont Law
School defied this – they
refused this hush money, giving up a million in federal funds because they
won’t let the recruiters on campus. This
shows it is possible for people to take this stand on principle – but it is UP
AGAINST THE WHOLE POLITICAL FRAMEWORK, democrat and republican right now, and
it is on US to spread this in ways that could be tremendously powerful.

Obama or Clinton talk about
beginning to withdraw troops in 60 days, and many mistakenly believe this is
about ending the war. In reality it only
reshapes the war in the service of a broader reach for empire – so they can
conduct greater military activity in Afghanistan,
Pakistan, and potentially Iran and other
countries. The differences among all the
candidates are taking place within very narrow margins: every potential
president is pledged to use military force against al-Qaeda, Iran, and Afghanistan,
and to an unbending alliance with Israel.

Torture

Our call to Drive Out the
Bush Regime said “that which you do not resist and mobilize to stop you will
learn – or be forced – to accept.” The
national discourse on torture bears this out.

What part of the structure of secret detentions,
destruction of habeas corpus, “enhanced” interrogation methods will go away
when Bush leaves office? The whole
apparatus has been given a new legal justification from the Justice Department:
even if particular methods or practices are illegal on international law,
that’s irrelevant because the president of the U.S.
has the authority to override those laws based
on the US
national interest, as he/she defines it.

Over the last few weeks, it’s come out that the
top 6 Bush regime officials met in the White House to plan discuss specific
torture techniques for how the CIA and military would interrogate specific
detainees in Guantanamo. VP “Dick”
Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Colin Powell, John Ashcroft, George Tenet and
Condoleezza Rice all sat down at a table DOZENS OF TIMES and discussed methods
of torture – one official reported they practically choreographed the crimes
against humanity that have been institutionalized in secret prisons and
military detention around the world. They know – and we should too – how
potentially damning this revelation is, if people act on it — Ashcroft himself
expressed concern back in 2002 that their involvement at that level of planning
could get them in trouble if it were found out.

That’s why the Military Commissions Act was
written with retroactive immunity for anyone carrying out or ordering enhanced
interrogation techniques. It’s why
Cheney and Ashcroft are not allowing their underlings, and refusing themselves,
to answer Congressional subpoenas. John
Yoo won’t go either, but we”ll get to him in a minute. The mainstream media is beginning to talk
about “war crimes” prosecutions and international law as if there might be a
problem for the Bush regime. (See the Phillippe
Sands article, “Green Light” in Vanity Fair)

If anyone acts like they don’t know their
government is torturing people on a widespread and systematic scale, they are
choosing NOT to know. We have to
continue to lead people to act against this – going out to people, into
classes, to institutions, and on worldcan’twait.org. Too many people have learned to accept this,
there is not nearly enough opposition to the revelations about these top level
torture meetings – but this is something that can change quickly if a beginning
core acts with moral clarity, something I will discuss plans around in a
minute.

To give a sense of how
potentially volatile this is, listen to this one story. Six detainees from Guantanamo are to be tried in military
commissions under the threat of death. A
few months ago Col. Morris Davis, who was the chief prosecutor for the military
commissions, quit in protest. He says
that for several years he was a proponent of the military commissions, as
opposed to trying those charged in civilian courts. Then he was told by someone above him in the
chain of command that “no acquittals will be allowed.” This is on top of the fact that civilian
lawyers trying to defend these six detainees can barely talk to their clients
and have to leave all the pertinent legal filings locked in the hands of the military.
Morris correctly concludes that there is no due process for those on
trial. He has now agreed to testify for
the defense, a situation he could never have imagined. This torture – along with the resistance to
it even inside the military — is going on NOW.

Want to talk about a fascist remaking of
society? How about the Christian
fundamentalist takeover of the US
military? General Robert Caslen was the star of a scandal in 2006, where it
came out that he was recruiting other officers in the Pentagon to join God’s
Army. In early May 2008 he was promoted. “Brigadier General Robert Caslen has retained his
position as the President of a virulently fundamentalist Christian organization
devoted to gaining unconstitutional control of the U.S. armed forces”The OCF’s
asserted purpose is to have ‘Christian officers exercise biblical leadership to
raise up a godly army’. One of its official study guides makes clear that OCF’s
aim is to ‘not allow the opposition, all of which is spearheaded by Satan, to
prevent us from reclaiming territory for Christ in the military.'”

Bring the Bush program to a halt.

Now is NOT the time to trim our sails or our
expectations, waiting for a better wind to carry us. This is the not the time to close up shop, not
the time to erase your email list, as I hear the Not in Our Name project did
recently when they shut down the organization.
It’s not the time to refuse to hold protests, with the reasoning that protests
would hurt the Democrat’s chances of winning the White House. United for Peace & Justice is still asking people to
write to Congress”.as if they don’t know already what the people think.

While the world is paying a terrible price for
the fact that the American people have not yet driven out this regime and its
program, for the fact that we have not yet succeeded in the mission of our Call
– it would be a terrible mistake to think we haven’t had a huge impact and that
there is not a lot that we must build on now.

We have repeated refused to accept the stultifying,
deadening political terms – and through doing so, in the face of controversy
and opposition, we have repeatedly helped to set DIFFERENT AND MUCH BETTER
TERMS. Since October, at our last major
national meeting, we set out to BE the resistance, and this has clarified
things for lots of people. We also set to
spread orange in opposition to the Bush regime.
This has yet to catch on on a truly societal scale, but orange is now widely
identified with stopping torture.

Even though people said, “you
shouldn’t do that”, we stepped in to the debate over whether waterboarding is
torture, and did public, professionally acted demonstrations of what the
technique is, starting in November, the day the new attorney general was being
questioned in Congress. Would anyone have
a visual of waterboarding if we hadn’t done this?

Two years ago people were
stepping over us as we knelt on the ground in orange jumpsuits and hoods. Today, torture became a featured subject at
the Academy Awards, seen by one billion people, when Taxi to the Dark Side won,
and its director spoke out. Professional
associations like the American Psychological Association are divided over
participation in torture. There was a
crisis among the writers of the TV show “24” which made torture acceptable. Something is shifting in public sentiment –
and we must push this further.

On Thursday 29 ports were shut down by the International
Longshore Workers Union. Hundreds of cranes and trucks motionless; no cargo
going out for 8 hours in an operation that runs 24/7. 25,000 workers didn’t work. I think we in World Can’t Wait WAY
underestimated the importance of their action. But THIS action was noticed in the mainstream
media. In an election year when everyone was telling you
not to do this, port workers take a day off.
This is rather extraordinary, and tells us something about the reservoir
of opposition among the people that you don’t see if you”re just counting
bodies at a protest.

This reservoir of opposition is, I believe, a big
reason the 2008 campaign started so
early, all the way back in 2006.

This a fight by those who rule over us to keep
people focused on their political terms and their political framework –
rather
than jumping out in opposition to this whole direction. But some
people keep jumping out of it. The Catholic Schoolgirls Against the
War did
direct action during Eastern Mass by the Catholic cardinal in Chicago.
They went right among the people, with a controversial and morally
clear
die-in calling for the war to end. World
Can’t Wait went in front of the White House on the fifth anniversary of
the
war, and the police did everything possible to prevent crime scene tape
from
being tied on the White House fence. Orange made it into the Oscars,
when worn by Paul Haggis, and Alex Gibney, who
directed the
winning film, “Taxi to the Dark Side.”

If it weren’t for us going out ahead of where
people are at, changing the discourse, publishing ads in the New York Times, pulling
the celebrity voices of conscience together, the discourse on war crimes and torture
would not have developed as it has. This
is something we should not lose sight of, and should step up with great
determination.

Three years ago, we set out to meet a great
need. We have not been able to achieve
the level of mass resistance and public repudiation needed to drive out the
Bush Regime. Bush and Cheney could still be driven out – the whole
world knows they”ve done way more than enough for that. But we should be talking about the fascist remaking
that has happened in the service of war for empire, and that all this needs to
be brought to a halt.

So what if this is a 15 round fight? So what if it has gone into double overtime
for you basketball fans? We are still in
this fight, the people still need us to win this fight, and there is still time
on the clock and many potential teammates of ours sitting on the bench.

The fact that the reservoir of people who hate
all this have not yet acted in a large enough number to stop this does NOT mean
that it can’t happen. It’s just wrong
philosophically. But we have learned that we have not just let people know
there is a movement, but make the argument WHY this is the only way that things
will change.

We need to bring forward the vision of a different dynamic and draw people into
this.
Instead of the elections setting the terms for millions”where
increasingly, people find themselves settling for less and less of what they
started out wanting, the action of the people at certain moments can set the
terms. Rev. Lennox Yearwood talks about
the “lunch counter moment” when the four black college students sat down at a
“whites only” segregated drugstore in Greensboro
North Carolina and galvanize a
huge movement against segregation.

They had right on their side, moral clarity, and
determination that they just weren’t going to accept Jim Crow anymore. And their actions, in a time as politically
charged as that was, changed the standard for everyone else. This had an electrifying and multiplying
effect.

These times are even more charged and there is
even more at stake.

Our moment is: The Bush regime or anyone else who
wants to be “commander-in-chief” has no right to recruit, invade, and
occupy. They are wrong to torture, justify
it, and lie about it.

We have set out to RESIST and MOBILZE TO STOP all this.
We”re choosing to put our energies in places where we can change the
terms, to go out and win in some key concentrated arenas. We must fight these to win and fight in such
a way that even if we don’t win each of these we create conditions where people
draw the right lessons and come back with even more determination and
perseverance.

All these elements should be taken up as part of
and in the service of establishing a different dynamic, a dynamic where people
are increasingly stepping out in independent political action, drawing clear
dividing lines against war crimes and crimes against humanity, setting new
terms and stopping this whole direction, bringing this whole program to a
halt. The world has indeed waited too
long.

World Can’t Wait Plans in 5 key areas: