Weekly Antiwar Vigil in Oakland Tuesday at Noon

You are invited to join the weekly vigil to call for an end to the U.S. war on the people of Iraq.
Tuesday, noon, Oakland Federal Building,
1301 Clay Street,
two short blocks from the 12th Street BART Station.

This vigil was begun in the spring of 1998, shortly after Madeline Albright toured the country in her unsuccessful attempt to gain support for a war against Iraq.
After a civil disobedience action to oppose the proposed attack, Ecumenical Peace Institute/CALC and Mustardseed Affinity Group decided to organize a weekly vigil to call for an end to the sanctions which were causing the deaths of 5,000 Iraqi children each month.
The vigil has continued since that time and other sponsors have joined in the effort. The focus has changed, now calling for an immediate end to the war and the occupation.
Each week we hand out approximately three hundred flyers. Usually they are different each week, unless upcoming events are being announced.
Below you will see the text of the flyer for the week mentioned in the subject line of this message.
Please join us.

End the Occupation –– Stop the War
Stop the Killing in Iraq

Haditha massacre the tip of the iceberg

Eyewitnesses and journalists have reported, and Rep. Murtha has confirmed, that U.S. Marines murdered 23 Iraqi civilians, many of them women and children, in Haditha last November, as revenge for the death of a comrade. ... The parallel to My Lai is unmistakable ­ the deliberate gunning down of unarmed noncombatants. Like the My Lai massacre, the Haditha massacre is also simply the tip of the iceberg. Although it represents an extreme of cold-blooded brutality, it joins countless incidents where noncombatants have been killed either deliberately or through negligence so broad that it amounts to depraved indifference to human life. When in Fallujah in April 2004, I myself witnessed the widespread shooting of noncombatants by snipers and even the targeting of ambulances.

Although not all U.S. soldiers act like the Marines in Haditha, there is a pervasive atmosphere of racist contempt for Iraqis and indifference to their fate. Soldiers who are trained from the beginning with chants of ‘Kill! Kill! Kill! Blood makes the grass grow’ are put in situations where they are dealing with a civilian population trying to go about ordinary life. It is no surprise that atrocities like these occur; they are inevitable in an occupation like this one. As the mother of one of the soldiers in the My Lai massacre told Seymour Hersh 35 years ago, ‘I gave them a good boy, and they sent me back a murderer.’ It’s time to end this war; the damage to Iraq, to American soldiers, and to our moral culture is too great.

Haditha also connects organically to a whole series of different ways to kill civilians – checkpoint killings by trigger-happy soldiers, indiscriminate return fire in crowded civilian areas, use of area weapons like 2000-pound bombs on “suspected insurgents,” and a general “shoot first ask questions later” policy – that frequently amounts to, if not deliberate murder, a depraved indifference to Iraqi life. Plant a gun on a man you’ve killed, or, for that matter, a shovel, and instantly he’s an “insurgent.”
http://www.empirenotes.org/

Rahul Mahajan is a Ph.D. in physics who for many years has devoted much attention to gathering data about Iraq and drawing the logical conclusions.


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Sign the Declaration of Peace http://www.declarationofpeace.org/
or call the local contact: Pace e Bene 510-268-8765
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PLEASE, call Congress 888-355-3588
Tell your representative. Not one more penny for war!
It's time to bring the troops home now!

Join the Vigil • Noon - 1:00 p.m. • Each Tuesday
Oakland Federal Building • 1301 Clay

Berkeley Women in Black • East Bay Coalition to Support Self-Rule for Iraqis
Bay Area Labor Committee for Peace and Justice • Peace & Freedom Party
Women for Peace • Mustardseed Affinity Group
Ecumenical Peace Institute • http://www.epicalc.org/ • (510) 548-4141