Killeen: Under the Hood Update, September, 2010
Friday, September 10th, 2010
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Posts Tagged ‘CodePink Austin’
Killeen: The War is Over | Alice Embree | The Rag Blog
Tuesday, September 7th, 2010
Dude. The War is over. President Obama visits with Iraq war veterans and their families at Fort Bliss, Texas, August 31. Photo from AFP.
(But don’t tell the GI’s at Fort Hood)
THE WAR IS OVER!
By Alice Embree / The Rag Blog / September 1, 2010
So do your duty, boys and join with pride
Serve your country in her suicide
Find the flags so you can wave goodbye
But just before the end even treason might be worth a try
This country is too young to die
I declare the war is over– Phil Ochs, 1966
See photos, Below.
KILLEEN, Texas — As Barack Obama declares the end of “combat operations” in Iraq, the haunting refrains of Phil Ochs’ “The War is Over,” reverberate through my psyche. Isn’t this the second time a U.S. president has said the Iraq war is over?
We are seven years into the Second Bush Iraq War. Fifty thousand troops and that many contractors remain in Iraq. The 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment (3rd ACR), a combat regiment, just deployed from Fort Hood to Iraq. The war’s not over.
It’s not over until the troops are home and the contractors’ checks can’t be cashed. The war’s not over for the Iraqi people until depleted uranium no longer poses a neonatal threat. It’s not over until Iraqi hospitals, electricity, and water are at least back to the levels of operation under Saddam Hussein, or better, back to the levels of operation prior to sanctions. The war’s not over until the five million displaced Iraqis can return home. It’s never over for the families of one million Iraqi dead.
The war’s not over for the U.S. soldiers returning with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI), or those who have lost limbs or the use of their limbs. It’s not over for the families of the more than 5,000 U.S. military men and women who died in Iraq.
On Sunday afternoon, August 29th, Dr. Dahlia Wasfi spoke to a packed crowd at the Texas State Employee Union’s meeting hall about the human catastrophe of U.S. policy in Iraq. As an Iraqi-American, she speaks with eloquence about her father’s place of birth. With her medical background, she brings disturbing details to the discussion of civilian casualties. She minces no words in describing the occupation.
Under the façade of liberation and democracy, U.S. troops seized the country, securing the oil fields, the Ministry of Oil, the Interior Ministry (CIA), and taking the lives of thousands of people. Iraq’s rich culture, history, and valuable assets were left vulnerable to stealth and destruction. In the years since [March 19, 2003], the lack of security, jobs, electricity, and potable water have made life for Iraqis unbearable… Our obligation to the people of Iraq, to the people of America, and to the rest of the world is the immediate and unconditional withdrawal of American troops and mercenaries from Iraq.
Go to www.liberatethis.com for more on Dr. Dahlia Wasfi.
On Monday morning, August 30th, a press conference in Killeen, Texas countered the claim that the Iraq war is over. Killeen is the home of Fort Hood, the nation’s largest military base. Rep. Lon Burnam of Fort Worth joined Dr. Dahlia Wasfi and representatives from Iraq Veterans Against the War (IVAW), Texas Labor Against the War, Veterans for Peace, CodePink Austin, and the Peace and Justice Support Network of the Mennonite Church at Killeen’s Under the Hood Café.
The common message was that the war continues. Rep. Lon Burnam got directly to the point highlighting the costs of the Iraq debacle.
The Killeen Daily Herald noted, in extensive coverage of the event, that
Burnam said he was tired of officials using the “financial back of us working folks” to fund conflicts, and quoted a 1953 speech by President Dwight Eisenhower: “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.”
In 1966 when Phil Ochs wrote his song, the Vietnam War was not over. In fact, it was far from over. In 2010, despite pronouncements from the Oval Office, the Iraq war is not over. The families of Fort Hood’s 3rd ACR can attest to that. And there is still another war raging in Afghanistan.
[Alice Embree is a long-time Austin activist and organizer, a former staff member of The Rag in Austin and RAT in New York, and a veteran of SDS and the women's liberation movement. She is active with CodePink Austin and Under the Hood Café. Embree is a contributing editor to The Rag Blog and is secretary of the New Journalism Project.]
Dr. Dahlia Wasfi speaking on the Humanitarian Catastrophe of U.S. Policy in Iraq, Austin, August 29, 2010, Texas State Employees Union. Photo by Carlos Lowry / The Rag Blog.
Dr. Dahlia Wasfi addresses media at Under the Hood press conference, August 30, 2010. Photo by Heidi Turpin / The Rag Blog.
Texas Rep. Lon Burnam of Ft. Worth at Under the Hood press conference. Photo by Heidi Turpin / The Rag Blog.
Under the Hood Press Conference. Seated (l-r): Dr. Dahlia Wasfi (Iraqi-American peace activist), Larry Egly (Mennonite Church), Leslie Cunningham (Texas Labor Against the War); Standing, Jim Turpin (CodePink Austin), Jack Prince (Veterans for Peace), Alice Embree (The Rag Blog), Jasmyne Thomas (Fort Hood military family member), Jeff Gernant (Iraq Veterans Against the War). Photos by Heidi Turpin / The Rag Blog.
http://theragblog.blogspot.com/2010/09/alice-embree-war-is-over.html
Killeen: “The War in Iraq is Not Over”–press conference at Under the Hood, August 30, 2010 | Killeen Daily Herald
Tuesday, August 31st, 2010Texas Labor Against the War joined other groups in a press conference highlighted by Texas State Representative Lon Burnam of Fort Worth and Iraqi-American Dr. Dahlia Wasfi, at Under the Hood Outreach Center and Cafe on Monday, August 30, 2010. For the full Killeen Daily Herald story, go to http://www.kdhnews.com/news/story.aspx?s=44003
RALLY FOR PEACE
- In the pic: Jack Prince of Veterans for Peace; Alice Embree of CodePink Austin and the Texas State Employees Union; seated is Cynthia Thomas, military spouse and manager of Under the Hood. Dr. Dahlia Wasfi is speaking. –Photo by Killeen Daily Herald
By Amanda Kim Stairrett
Killeen Daily Herald
August 30, 2010
Peace activists gathered in Killeen Monday morning to speak out against U.S. military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The event, which was hosted at Killeen’s Under the Hood Café, focused on Iraq and the president’s recent announcement that U.S. combat operations ended there today. Speakers also questioned the deployment of the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment to Iraq. The final of several thousand of the regiment’s troopers departed Fort Hood for the Middle East Friday in what military officials call an advise-and-assist mission. Those soldiers will assist Provincial Reconstruction Teams and help prepare Iraqi security forces to care for and protect their own nation.
The 1st Cavalry Division’s 4th Brigade Combat Team will deploy soon for the same mission.
Central Texas activists were in town Aug. 23 to protest the regiment’s deployment. As buses carried soldiers from main post to West Fort Hood’s Robert Gray Army Airfield, demonstrators waited on the overpass with their headlights turned off, according to information from Fort Hood and videos posted on YouTube by participants.
As the buses drove south on Clarke Road Gate at about 3:40 a.m., the demonstrators held up banners and chanted. Several blocked the buses’ path for a short time.
“Acting to protect Department of Defense personnel and equipment, Fort Hood police moved the demonstrators away from the intersection to the sidewalk,” read a statement from Fort Hood.
Individuals were released without incident and the bus convoy continued to the airfield, it went on to read.
Post officials did have advance knowledge about the demonstration, they said.
Monday’s speakers included Cynthia Thomas, Under the Hood manager; Rep. Lon Burnam, a Democrat from Fort Worth and former director of the Dallas Peace Center; Dr. Dahlia Wasfi, a peace activist of Muslim and Jewish heritage; Larry Egly, of the Peace and Justice Support Network of Mennonite Church USA; and Leslie Cunningham, of Texas Labor Against the War.
CodePink Austin, Iraq Veterans Against the War and Veterans For Peace were also represented.
Monday’s event was just one of two in Central Texas “aimed at peeling back the mass deception surrounding ‘the end of combat operations,’” according to information from Under the Hood. The first was a talk in Austin Sunday featuring Wasfi.
Most Americans are lulled to sleep because they think the war is over, Burnam said. He attacked Presidents Bush and Obama, saying the “expansionist” war was an illegal and immoral occupation — something that was fiscally wrong to start seven years ago.
Burnam heavily criticized the Iraq war’s financial burden on the country, saying it was wrong for Bush to start two “outrageous” wars while providing tax cuts. Burnam said he was tired of officials using the “financial back of us working folks” to fund conflicts, and quoted a 1953 speech by President Dwight Eisenhower: “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.”
It is time for Obama to end the occupation, end tax cuts for the rich and cure a deficit that will hurt “our children and grandchildren,” Burnam went on to say.
Thomas said Under the Hood started a telephone campaign to make sure non-deployable soldiers were not deployed. The organization has previously worked with soldiers and families from the regiment who said they were not fit to deploy.
The administration and command know there aren’t enough soldiers to cover two wars, Thomas said, and they continue to ignore family members and soldiers instead of focusing on their well-being.
“This community is not going to be able to survive it much longer,” she said.
The 1 percent of the U.S. population in uniform are the ones fighting and paying the most, Thomas said.
If people really wanted to support the troops, they would be fighting for them to come home, she added.
Contact Amanda Kim Stairrett at [email protected] or (254) 501-7547. Follow her on Twitter at KDHmilitary or www.facebook.com/astairrett.
For more information
Under the Hood is located at 17 S. College St. It is open daily from 5 to 10 p.m. Visit the café online at www.underthehoodcafe.org.
For more information about Texas Labor Against the War, visit www.txlaboragainstwar.org or call (512) 470-8485.
Peace and Justice Support Network of Mennonite Church USA can be found online at http://peace.mennolink.org.
Houston: Getting Naked to Expose BP | Medea Benjamin | The Rag Blog
Friday, May 28th, 2010TxLAW note: British Petroleum (Biggest Polluter) around the world–is also one of the oil giants trying to take over control of Iraq’s oil reserves: http://txlaboragainstwar.org/wp-content/uploads/stop_pamphlet.pdf
CodePink demonstrators at BP headquarters in Houston, May 24, 2010. Photos from CodePink / Flickr.
Naked truth:
Exposing BP’s criminal behavior
By Medea Benjamin / May 27, 2010
HOUSTON — Diane Wilson, a fourth generation shrimper from the Texas Gulf and a founder of CODEPINK, has been watching the BP spill and the botched clean-up with a mixture of dread and anger. After all, it’s her livelihood and that of her community that’s at stake.
“I’ve lived all my life in the Gulf Coast, in the oil, chemical, and gas hellhole we call an energy corridor,” said Diane Wilson with her Texas twang. “I’ve been fightin’ these polluters for 21 years. But this BP spill is the nail in the coffin of the people who make their living along the Gulf Coast. This is our 9/11 in slow motion.”
Diane has been incensed by the cavalier attitude of BP CEO Tony Hayward, who said that the largest oil spill in U.S. history is a tiny speck in the vast ocean. “He had the nerve to say that those miles upon miles of underwater oil plumes that stretch to who knows where and do who knows what to the fisheries, the ecosystem, and Gulf of Mexico for possibly generations, is really going to have a ‘very, very modest impact.’ Sittin’ there listening to BP’s lies made my blood boil,” Diane fumed. “I realized I better get off my butt and do somethin’ about it.”
This 61-year-old grandmother of five is all about action. To protest chemical companies polluting her bay, in 2002 Diane climbed a chemical tower, chained herself to it and then did a 30-day water-only hunger strike. As a CODEPINK co-founder who tried to stop the invasion of Iraq in 2003, an invasion she knew was all about oil, Diane got arrested confronting Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld at a Congressional hearing. Then she scaled and tied herself to the White House fence (and almost got shot by a sniper). She even traveled to Iraq when the U.S. military was about to attack, putting herself forward as a human shield.
So Diane put out a call for people to join her in Houston on Monday, May 24, to protest at the BP headquarters. Looking for a creative way to expose the company’s criminal behavior (and entice the media, who rarely cover protests in Texas), Diane was inspired by the example of a group of women from Nigeria who took over a Chevron oil rig and threatened to strip naked if the company didn’t hire more local workers and invest in the community. Faced with just the threat of nudity, Chevron gave in.
“If the Nigerian women could use their bodies on the Niger Delta, why can’t we do it in downtown Houston?” Diane reasoned.
Diane doesn’t take nudity lightly. She didn’t grow up in a hippie commune, but in a fundamentalist Pentecostal family in rural Texas.
I was taught that flesh is sinful, it’s the devil. I was so modest that if my sister said the word ‘bra’, I would climb under the table. I was horrified by anything intimate. So for me, using nudity to expose the truth about BP was WAY outside my comfort zone. But I realized that it’s the destruction of our ecosystem by corporate greed that’s obscene, not a woman’s body.
To prepare for the action, Diane got 100 pounds of fish from her fishing buddies, old fishing nets to drag the dead fish and fake oil to dump on them. She and one of her daughters made beautiful signs saying “Expose BP” and “The Naked Truth about Drill, Baby, Drill” and put them on big sandwich boards. “You could say we was cheatin’ because we decided to use sandwich boards to cover our private parts, but that’s about as nude as those of us from Texas can get,” laughed Diane. “We’ll leave the full-on nudity to the women from California.”
The action was superb. About 100 people showed up from all over Texas and six other states — including California. Some people wore pasties that said “No BP,” some dressed as fishermen, oily birds, and fish. Diane put on her white rubber fishing boots, smeared herself with oil and wore a sandwich board that read “Expose BP’s Obscene Side.”
Two imposter oil workers in BP uniforms doused the group with fake oil, causing the birds and fish to recoil and die on the sidewalk. The police and BP security stood by watching, as nice as could be. It was obvious that BP higher ups had the good sense to tell them that arresting protesters would not help their image.
The group was having fun mocking BP, but when Diane took the megaphone to speak, the tone changed. “I am here because I’m outraged,” she said, her voice shaking. “My family has lived on this gulf for 100 years, we’ve been fishing these waters for generations and now we’re seeing it decimated. All we’re getting from BP is lies. We’re not getting any answers from the government. That’s why people have to hit the streets to demand solutions.”
After the action, I sat down with Diane to hear her solutions and ideas for future actions. “BP should be shaken down like a rotten fig tree,” she said.
The government should seize their profits and use them for the clean up and then to invest in clean energy. We should shame those senators who want to stop the Big Oil Bailout Prevention Act legislation that would raise oil companies’ liability from a pitiful $75 million to $10 billion. And we should demand that our government stop offshore drilling. No new permits, period. We have to seize this moment to move our country away from fossil fuels that are responsible for environmental devastation and wars.
CODEPINK has asked supporters to email letters to Senator Murkowski, asking her to stop blocking the Big Bailout Prevention Act. It’s time to protect the fishermen, the coastal residents and the wildlife, not the corporation at fault for the disaster.
But for Diane, sending emails is not enough. She is calling on people throughout the country to boycott BP — not just passively, but by getting out to BP gas stations to protest and educate their communities on the company and the catastrophe. CODEPINK supports her call to action and is providing resources for action on our website. We’ll also be bringing Diane to Washington, DC, to confront Congress, the White House Administration, and BP executives with the crude awakening about Big Oil.
“Pass out fliers to drivers. Ride your bikes around the stations. Get creative. Hey, maybe you even want to do your own nude protest,” she grins. “Expose BP. Expose that Drill, Baby, Drill means Spill, Baby, Spill. After all, what’s at stake is nothing less than our planet. And that’s the naked truth.”
[International peace activist Medea Benjamin was a founder of CODEPINK.]
Thanks to Fran Hanlon
For lots more photos, see the Rag Blog:
http://theragblog.blogspot.com/2010/05/medea-benjamin-getting-naked-in-houston.html
See also CODEPINK: Women for Peace at http://www.codepinkalert.org/
and CODEPINK Austin at http://www.codepinkaustin.com/
Healthcare Not Warfare–Rally in Austin October 17
Wednesday, September 23rd, 2009Saturday, October 17, 3:00 – 6:00 PM
HEALTHCARE NOT WARFARE RALLY
Texans will rally on the eighth anniversary of the invasion and occupations of Afghanistan/Iraq to challenge the government to end those wars and focus on national priorities such as healthcare and the economy. The rally will include speakers, musicians, Iraq veterans, health care professionals, religious leaders, peace activists and families affected by lack of healthcare and the impacts of war. Confirmed speakers and musicians include: Roscoe Overton, President, Austin Center for Peace and Justice, Dr. Jim Rigby, Pastor, St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church, Charlie Jackson, Founder, Texans for Peace, Medea Benjamin, Co-founder, Code Pink, Joe Carr, John Ramsey and Will T. Massey. Join with your fellow Texans to help bring an end to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan while standing up for healthcare and jobs for all.
Location: Austin City Hall, Cesar Chavez and Lavaca
Sponsored by Texans for Peace, CodePink-Austin, Austin Center for Peace and Justice, and other peace/social justice groups. More info: Heidi at 565-2244 or [email protected]
