“I was in Iraq in ’03, and what I saw there crushed me,” former U.S. Army sergeant Ash Woolson told thousands of people last Sunday afternoon from a makeshift stage at the edge of the security perimeter around Chicago’s McCormick Place Convention Center, where the NATO summit was being held.

As the international meeting was getting underway that day, thousands marched for peace through the city’s downtown. They were led by contingents of U.S. veterans like Woolson organized by Iraq Veterans Against the War, 40 of whom eventually mounted the ad hoc stage, where they brought the symbolic and tangible purpose of the week’s protests into sharp focus by attempting to publicly return their service medals, including their Global War on Terror awards.

Read the rest of this article »

The past couple of weeks have been something of a roller-coaster for National Nurses United and it all culminates this Friday morning with the first major march and rally in what is expected to be a weekend of protest in Chicago. But it was a fight to get even there. Last Tuesday, Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel and his administration announced that the National Nurses United (NNU) protest against austerity measures that benefit NATO, the G8, and other elites would not be allowed to end its May 18 rally in Daley Plaza. The anti-NATO-G8 protest—billed as “a rally to tax Wall Street and heal America” — will likely draw thousands into the Loop on a workday afternoon and, as such, was threatened to be marginalized to Grant Park’s Butler field, according to NNU organizers.

Read the rest of this article »

Catholic Workers outside Chicago's Prudential Building, via Jose M. Osorio/Chicago Tribune.

Catholic Workers and friends gathered yesterday morning at the Prudential Building in Chicago — home to President Obama’s campaign headquarters — to say “No to NATO; Yes to Community.”

“We are here today,” said Chantal de Alacuaz from Chicago, “to boldly proclaim our desire to live in a world where we say no to NATO and yes to community. As Catholic Workers, we serve the poor by practicing the works of mercy by feeding the hungry, sheltering the homeless, and taking care of the sick. The works of war are directly opposed to that.”

Read the rest of this article »

A mural by students at Rudy Lozano Leadership Academy in Chicago depicting the realities of NATO.

As NATO forces find themselves under fire in Afghanistan, NATO’s spokespersons are taking to another battlefield to win the hearts and minds of an increasingly skeptical populace: Chicago Public Schools. Last month, the Chicago Tribune reported from a sixth-grade classroom where representatives from the Chicago NATO Host Committee gave a primer on NATO and its member countries to the Walt Disney Magnet School on the Northside of Chicago.

According a Host Committee press release, the classroom visits and programming are part of a whole series of events “designed to engage and educate residents about the upcoming NATO Summit.” Other events include sponsored sports competitions, culinary classes and specialized menus at Chicago restaurants featuring NATO member countries’ heritages, and a three-part speaker series:

Read the rest of this article »

Dear friends of ordinary 99 percent Afghans,

We thank you for your love and your hands and feet, in organizing for the upcoming Chicago protests!

In these killing days, we in Afghanistan do not expect the interests of people to triumph over self-interests. But your efforts prove that another world is possible.

However, respectfully, late May demonstrations are probably too late to request that the majority of public opinion against the Afghan war be placed on NATO’s table, so as to end the ineffectual wasting of tax money on a futile war strategy. War doesn’t work!

By the time you take to the streets in Chicago on May 20, the U.S. Afghan Strategic Partnership Agreement for a long term U.S. military presence in Afghanistan will have been signed.

Read the rest of this article »

Robert Bales in August, 2011.

I spent yesterday morning listening to my local NPR station, which was broadcasting a discussion amongst a panel of military veterans who had returned from deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan. The six panelists were male and female, black, white and Latino, and spanned a few generations. I had one of those clichéd “driveway moments” that NPR loves to raise money from — when you sit in your car in your driveway because you can’t stop listening — even though I don’t even have a driveway. They said all sorts of extraordinary things (and I am paraphrasing here because I wasn’t taking notes at the time):

“To put it bluntly, I killed people. That was my job in the Army.”

“I did not fight for the politics or the big picture; I fought for the guy on either side of me.”

“I’m glad I went in. I got to experience different things.”

As I listened, I realized that I have no close friends who are recent veterans.

Read the rest of this article »

Ghulamai in Bamiyan Province, Afghanistan.

When we finally stepped off the helicopter and greeted the mountains of Bamiyan, Afghanistan, I was exhausted. A full day and a half after our departure, my eyelids were heavy and I was hoping, desperately, for a cup of warm, life-giving tea and a pile of blankets to collapse into. But the group of Afghans who invited us there — not an elite assembly of men with corporate interests or a bureaucratic non-profit, but a rag-tag group of teenagers who believe in the power of nonviolence — had a different idea in mind.

We dropped off our bags in the rooms we would be staying for the next week and were led, a boy on each arm, through the winding streets of Bamiyan City after dark. Like most Afghans, the Afghan Youth Peace Volunteers live in a province that is extremely poor, with very few opportunities for paid work and little infrastructure. The city of 60,000 has no indoor plumbing and generators that provide only a few hours of dirty electricity a night — so the youth there long ago memorized the geography of the dirt roads for navigating them at night.

Read the rest of this article »

Today, March 16, marks the 44th anniversary of the My Lai Massacre in Vietnam. When the story broke — first in Europe, while American media and politicians ignored and doubted the merits of the account, and then in the U.S. after Seymour Hersh’s investigative reporting — the American political machine under President Nixon went into high gear to contain whatever domestic or international blowback there might be. It took more than a year for the American public to know a massacre had even happened and much longer to understand the full details of the so-called “isolated incident.”

Outrage over another massacre, this one decades later and in Afghanistan, is much more prescient, but the American political establishment remains stubbornly predictable. The Obama administration has had to apologize again to the Afghan people for another tragic “isolated incident.” This time, a lone American soldier — it’s always one bad apple — stationed in Kandahar left Camp Belambay in the middle of the night on Monday, March 12, walked more than a mile to the village of Najibian, broke into multiple homes and indiscriminately shot and stabbed men, women and children. Sixteen Afghan civilians — mostly poor farmers and their families — were murdered by an Army sergeant for no reason other than being Afghan.

Read the rest of this article »

• Several hundred Tibetans have protested against Chinese rule in the western province of Qinghai since a monk there set himself on fire earlier this week. The advocacy group Free Tibet has posted what it calls “unprecedented footage” of this highly restricted and restive part of western China.

• Between 5,000 and 7,000 Chilean high school students marched down Santiago’s main avenue on Thursday to demand free quality education and protest the expulsion of about 100 students who joined last year’s protests. Police broke up the march with water canons after a few hundred students crossed a police barrier and tried to march to the education ministry.

• Thousands of union workers gathered across Illinois on Thursday to protest Gov. Pat Quinn’s proposed budget cuts that include mass layoffs and the closure and consolidation of several state facilities, including prisons.

• Hundreds of people gathered in the Rotunda of the Utah State Capitol in Salt Lake City on Thursday to urge Gov. Gary Herbert to veto a bill that would forbid school districts to teach use of contraceptives.

• Russian opposition activist Sergei Udaltsov started a hunger strike on Thursday after being sentenced to 10 days in jail for disobeying the police following a rally against Russian leader Vladimir Putin.

• Afghans took to the streets on Thursday to demand a U.S. soldier accused of killing 16 civilians be prosecuted in Afghanistan as word spread that the American military moved him out of the country.

• A group of about 75 demonstrators assembled at LOVE Park on Wednesday to support immigrant rights. Two college students were arrested after blocking traffic with banners and refusing to move

• Hundreds of thousands of people in 60 cities across Spain took part Sunday in demonstrations called by the country’s main trade unions to protest the government’s tough new labor reforms and cutbacks.

• Hundreds of students in eastern Afghanistan on Tuesday protested against the U.S. and the American soldier who killed 16 Afghan civilians in a shooting spree on Sunday.

• Tens of thousands of people joined an opposition rally in Bangladesh’s capital on Monday to demand that a nonpartisan caretaker government oversee the next general election.

• Tens of thousands of people rallied near Japan’s crippled Fukushima plant Sunday demanding an end to nuclear power as the nation marked the first anniversary of a disastrous quake and tsunami.

• Thousands of students at an all-female university in Saudi Arabia boycotted classes on Saturday, protesting against poor services in a rare display of dissent from women in the conservative Islamic kingdom.

• Tens of thousands of pro-union demonstrators descended on the Wisconsin Capitol on  Saturday to voice their anger at Gov. Scott Walker and his conservative agenda, using the anniversary of the passage of his signature collective bargaining law  to rally support for efforts to remove him and five other Republicans from  office.

• Tens of thousands of Bahrainis demonstrated outside the capital Manama on Friday to demand political reforms, a year after the Gulf Arab state crushed an uprising.

• More than 50,000 workers in Italy participated in demonstrations and a nationwide strike on Friday, calling for democracy in the workplace and accusing the government of acting in the interests of the banks and industrial groups.