By Kathy Kelly

Members of the Nanum Center in South Korea invited me for a visit.

Immediately before, during and after the Shock and Awe campaign, 2003, several waves of South Korean peace activists and human rights activists joined with Iraq Peace Team members. We felt quite fortunate to learn from them and were heartened by their deep desire to prevent further suffering imposed on innocent people. I visited with the people who had joined with the Iraq Peace Team; lovely, eager people, most of them quite young, who want to find nonviolent alternatives to war. I was greatly impressed to know that many of them are aware of the School of the Americas Watch campaign.

Speech at US Labor Against War Conference/Chicago, Illinois/12-4-2004
By Bill Fletcher, Jr

Thank you very much and good morning. I am very pleased and honored to be at this conference and speaking with you this morning, December 4th, the 35th anniversary of the murder of Black Panther Party leader Fred Hampton here in the city of Chicago.

I want to speak about 3 things: the elections; the issue of empire; and the crisis in the AFL-CIO. Believe it or not, I hope to accomplish this in less than 8 hours.

By Robert Fisk

Who said this and when?

“The people of England have been led in Mesopotamia into a trap from which it will be hard to escape with dignity and honour. They have been tricked into it by a steady withholding of information. The Baghdad communiques are belated, insincere, incomplete. Things have been far worse than we have been told, our administration more bloody and inefficient than the public knows… We are today not far from a disaster.”

By Sheila Provencher

“Open the door! Open the door!”

The soldier’s face was only about a foot away. “Give me the camera,” he demanded. “Now!”

My colleague Tom had been on our apartment rooftop moments before. He saw about 10 young soldiers playing with neighborhood kids. The soldiers swung the children into the air, earning giggles and shrieks of delight. Tom snapped a picture. “I wanted a photo so I could prove that soldiers do something more than just shoot people,” he later explained.

The effect was instantaneous: within five seconds, five soldiers were at the door shouting for the camera.

“Let us in!”

Tom of Tomdispatch.com says of this Rebecca Solnit essay “…this time on death near and far, personal and apocalyptic, in South Asia, in Iraq, and on the death of Susan Sontag; on death that we see and death that we don’t, and on what we might begin to make of it all.”

By Rebecca Solnit

The news of Susan Sontag’s death arrived as a single sentence spoken in the opening moments of a radio news program Tuesday morning, and then the program returned to what had been the main story since the day after Christmas: the tsunami and the death toll, then in the tens of thousands, that would continue to rise. It was strange to weigh these two incidents of mortality against each other. Though for some people it would be considered insensitive or irreverent even to do so, one of the things to be appreciated about Sontag, I think, is that she considered everything a proper occasion for more thinking, more analyzing, more writing.