By Debra Sweet 
99 to 0! And it would have been 100 Senators to 0 if Robert Byrd had been alive to vote to confirm General Petraeus on Wednesday. Thursday the House voted money to keep the occupation going with $37 billion. Afghanistan gets chewed up for going on ten years.
Petraeus rushed to Afghanistan yesterday for work on a planned "surge" on Kandahar. But the conflict over how to proceed there which was revealed in Defense Secretary Gates issued detailed "rules of engagement" for the military…for the press…so that no one in the military speaks frankly again about the war.
Controversy, not over whether the U.S. war strategy is "working," but whether it’s justified at all, should be challenging a lot of people, who should hear our answer. It doesn’t matter the commander or the strategy, these occupations are wrong, immoral, unjust, illegitimate. And YOU have a role in stopping them.
I am headed back to the Gulf coast to support the work of the new Emergency Committee to Stop the Gulf Oil Disaster. I appreciate having met more people this week in NYC and Washington while speaking about the oil spill and the war, and invite all of you to come to New Orleans to join in political protest, fact-finding and trying to get the real story out!
Protesters from the Emergency Committee caught the attention of VP Biden this week in New Orleans, as reported by United Press International: Biden was greeted by a half-dozen protesters carrying signs stating "Oil kills" when his motorcade arrived for a briefing and tour of the unified command center in downtown New Orleans. "I don’t think the American people have any idea" how many resources are being used to fight the spill," the vice president said afterward.
Our friend Dahr Jamail, who’s reported for years from Iraq & Afghanistan, is now on the political battlefield in the Gulf of Mexico.
"…Contrary to Biden’s statement about American people not having ‘any idea’ how many resources are being used to fight the spill, these ‘American people’ have a precise "idea" about how many resources are being used to fight the oil disaster. As though fate chose to underscore the vacuous remarks of the Vice President, on the front page of today’s Times-Picayune of New Orleans is a story about how US government bureaucracy is preventing large numbers of oil-skimming boats from reaching the Gulf of Mexico. For more than a week federal response officials have been pressed to streamline US maritime restrictions that would allow more foreign skimming vessels to be put to work in the Gulf…"
War Criminals Watch: Hey activist videographers – send us your videos!
War Criminals Watch is having an exciting contest – we’ll post all appropriate videos on WarCriminalsWatch.org in August with the top four and winner specially highlighted.
And, if cartoons or comic are your thing, we are accepting that genre as well!
We are in the midst of an absolutely horrendous oil catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico. At the same time, our major concern has been war criminals – who also happen to have a tremendous interest in oil. Well, well, what do you know?
Use your creativity and produce a five-minute or shorter video on one or more of these planetary criminals.
- George W. Bush
- Richard Cheney
- Robert Gates
- William J. Haynes
- Condoleeza Rice
Posters of some of the above are also available.
