By Debra Sweet
Our statement has been published in the New York Review of Books, and email and calls are coming in. Thanks to Anthony: "i don’t know if i say this enough but … World Can’t Wait ROCKS!!!!!!!" and to Gene: "The ad arrived in my mailbox. It looks awesome and reads awesome… It’s a great piece of work. Let’s do some more!"
The statement, Crimes Are Crimes – No Matter Who Does Them, for which you donated almost $12,000, began appearing in mailboxes in The New York Review of Books on May 5. We are posting comments from people whose names appear in the ad:
Dennis Loo: "Millions hoped that electing Obama would reverse Bush’s horrendous policies and precedents. Obama has not only not reversed the Bush agenda, he has in critical areas, pushed the Bush agenda further, thereby legitimating and institutionalizing monstrous policies. These moves represent nothing less than the de facto and de jure overturning of the rule of law, supplanting it with the rule of men accountable to no laws and no principles but what they can perpetually justify as necessary under the "war on terror" rationale.
The US and world are now at a fateful crossroads. The "Crimes Are Crimes: No Matter Who Does Them" statement sounds an inspiring call from an alternative moral authority, planting a separate pole for those people of conscience to rally around and to popularize, with the aim of winning growing numbers of people to eventually sharply alter this society’s fundamental direction."
David Swanson: "As offensive as are the wars and specific war crimes themselves, is realizing how many people only pretend to oppose them when the president belongs to a particular political party. And as encouraging as it is to see some limited outrage over torture, I find it difficult to breath when the president claims the power to assassinate Americans with almost no public reaction, and escalates the war that encompasses all the crimes with almost no resistance. Either we are a nation of laws or we are a nation of partisan loyalists zig-zagging our way through election cycles to oblivion."
Matthis Chiroux: "Obama claims we cannot free the middle east for three reasons: they won’t build anything, they’ll just kill each other or they’ll come back and kill us. The fact that our first Black president is making the same arguments that white slaveowners made to defend their practices is a degree of horror beyond what Bush was ever capable of. Obama’s racist wars for empire are crimes."
YOU can still donate so this message appears in other outlets. Send me your suggestions.
American Experience on PBS recently broadcast My Lai, a documentary on the massacre of Vietnanmese civilians – mostly women and children and elderly – by
We Are Not Your Soldiers hits the ground running in
read more…
The tour also went to U.C. Santa Barbara. You can tune into KPFK online and listen to Matthis Chiroux, one of the We Are Not Your Soldiers speakers (and an Iraq War resister), interviewed on the Michael Slate show. recording.
Who’s Saying "Drill Baby Drill"?
On March 31st, President Obama announced that he would be lifting a moratorium on off-shore drilling in the
Our hearts are filled with sadness for the destruction of the already fragile gulf coast ecosystem & the abundant species that call it home. World Can’t Wait is covering this crime against the planet. Below is some of our initial coverage. Stay tuned for more.
The Victims of Louisiana’s Worsening Oil Spill
Environmental Catastrophe Looms on Gulf Coast
The Horrible Gulf Oil Spill Reality vs the "Energy Tomorrow Pantsuit"