June 16th to June 30th
Initiated by Jubilee Iraq* and Voices in the Wilderness**

Participants also include members of Jubilee USA and Progressive Democrats of America

As international social justice activists, including citizens of Iraq, the U.S. and the U.K., we stand united and resolved to seek an end to the ongoing economic exploitation of Iraq. Such exploitation is a form of violence which must be resisted. Those of us who are citizens of the U.S. and U.K. bear a special responsibility as it is our respective countries which created and held firm to the economic sanctions regime which devastated Iraq’s health care, education, water and electrical infrastructure.

Vigil on behalf of 3 “prisoners of conscience” to be held in Lawton, OK — Event is planned to show support for soldiers being jailed for refusing to fight in Iraq.

See Calendar for complete information

Cindy Sheehan (photo: Sharon)

I’m holding a newspaper clipping from 1996. The creases are torn, the page yellowed. The headline reads “Mother bear charges trains.” Trains had killed her two sons, and so this mother grizzly charged train after train after train.

At first I carried this clipping in my wallet, and then I taped it over my desk. It helps me remember what it means to be courageous, what it means to be alive. -Derrick Jensen

Cindy Sheehan, whose son Casey was killed in the Iraq war, is definately charging the train head on, courageously.

Since Saturday, August 6th, Cindy Sheehan has held a vigil outside President Bush’s ranch in Crawford, Texas demanding an audience with the president to ask why her son died in Iraq. Sheehan has no plans to end her vigil until Bush meets with her to discuss the war, he returns to the White House, or she is arrested.

The following is a compilation of information and articles concerning Cindy Sheehan’s action in Crawford, Texas.

Voices in the Wilderness-NYC Moves to Bring Attention to Iraq’s Water Crisis

by Anna J. Brown, Voices in the Wilderness-NYC

In the “Bechtel’s Dry Run: Iraqis Suffer Water Crisis (2004)” report published by Public Citizen’s Water for All Campaign, its North American reader meets Ahmed Abdul Rida, a resident of Baghdad’s Sadr City. Mr. Rida, whose family members join a million others in dire poverty, is waiting for the two to three hours of electricity available per day to be activated so that he may use his family’s water pump. Since the water that he is able to pump is derived from the polluted waters of the Tigris River, what he and his family end up drinking is described as a “concentrated cocktail of pesticides, fertilizers, heavy metals from antiquated piping, and unknown amounts of depleted uranium, raw sewage and other chemicals from American and Iraqi munitions from the 1991 Gulf war, and the more recent Anglo-American invasion.” [1]

The story of Mr. Rida has been quite present to me during the month of July as I join friends and comrades in the WATER NOT WAR effort sponsored by Voices in the Wilderness of New York City. [2] When I ride the subway to each of our Wednesday and Saturday demonstrations, I meditate on the plight of the Rida family: What is it like to offer your young son or daughter a glass of brown colored and foul smelling water? What is it like to hand your elderly mother or pregnant wife a drink that may cause diarrhea, kidney stones, cholera and that damages the liver and brain? When I imagine the desperate thirst that wells up in a land where summer temperatures routinely top 100 degrees Fahrenheit, the necessity and the urgency of awareness about this devastating water crisis in Iraq brings to mind this insight of Dr. Martin Luther King’s: “We are tied together in the single garment of destiny, caught in an inescapable network of mutuality. And whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly. For some strange reason I can never be what I ought to be unless you are what you ought to be.” [3]

Jeff Leys and Kathy Kelly, of Voices in the Wilderness, speak of civil disobedience and the closing of the Extremely Low Frequency Systems (ELF) site at Clam Lake, Wisconsin.

By ANDREW BROMAN
The Daily Press
Monday, May 02nd

Jeff Leys knew he’d probably spend time in prison if he tried to cut down a section of antenna at the Project ELF site.

He was no stranger to civil disobedience, but the stakes are higher when it comes to damaging federal property. You don’t simply wake up one morning and decide to saw into a pole holding the antenna that sends signals to U.S. submarines armed with nuclear weapons deep in the ocean.

“I was at a point of being able to risk a felony charge, but it was something that had evolved over a three, four, five year process,” Leys said.