By David Swanson

Imagine you could take years and years to carefully study political history, that you could read numerous sources of political news from around the world, that you could do your own research into declassified government documents and little known areas of information, and that you could travel extensively so that you might compare various societies and governments in the current day.

If you can get someone to pay you or feed you while you do all of that, then by all means do it. read more

PDA Communications
By David Swanson

Tim has asked me to help with developing a national network for PDA communications, meaning a group of people at the national level, and others at the state and local levels, working together to make our voices heard. I’m hoping that this discussion today will produce some ideas for this and some volunteers to help with it.

I’ve worked on some projects that used a network of local volunteers to communicate, including AfterDowningStreet and Kucinich read more

Civil Resistance at the White House
By David Swanson

PHOTO GALLERY

I got to the White House around noon and found hundreds of people gathered awaiting the arrival of marchers who planned to get themselves arrested protesting the war.

I ran into Mike Ferner of Veterans for Peace, who showed me the paperwork from his arrest early this morning at the Pentagon. He said he’d been one of 41 people arrested between 6:30 and nearly 7:30 a.m. at the Pentagon. Three Veterans for Peace members had read more

Introduction of Cindy Sheehan, Recipient of Pacifica Radio’s Unvarnished Truth Award
By David Swanson

I came to know Cindy Sheehan in May, and

By David Swanson

Numerous media organizations regularly poll members of the public on whether they approve of the President’s job performance. Uniformly, these polls show a dramatic upsurge in approval of Bush immediately following the attacks of September 11, 2001, but a decline in approval following Hurricane Katrina.

Working in favor of national sanity is the fact that the hurricane is more recent than the airplane attacks. While it seems distinctly unlikely that people will yet begin read more

Yuppies and the Peace Movement
By David Swanson

PART 1

The single biggest reason that the peace movement is not larger and more aggressive is that people with one foot in it are focused on trying to be respectable in the eyes of the corporate media, for their own sake and

By David Swanson

I came to Crawford today, and it’s a little different from DC in several ways, but mostly it’s hotter. I’ve been to both Camp Caseys, and am blogging this from the cool of the Crawford Peace House. At Camp Casey 1, I went across the road and talked to the half-dozen pro-war protesters. (There are police in the middle who have declared that there must be no interaction, but I didn’t ask their permission.) I asked the pro-warers what they would tell Cindy read more

By David Swanson

There’s a press conference at 10:30 a.m. CT every day at Camp Casey 2 near Crawford, Texas, and today was no exception.

PHOTO OF PRESS CONFERENCE: http://tinyurl.com/coayr

Seven military family members and veterans spoke very briefly, then Cindy Sheehan spoke, and then Cindy answered questions from the assembled representatives of our (private) public communications system. The whole thing took 20 minutes. Then it took me 20 minutes to drive back to the Crawford Peace House, read more

There never seem to be more than 3 people there, but there is an anti-Cindy “camp” in Crawford. In the back of it is a board with a schedule written on it of counter protests. Here’s a photo of it.

Here are more photos.

By David Swanson

It’s very, very early morning on Saturday, August 27, in Crawford, Texas. The roads are as dark as Dick Cheney’s heart, and the stars as numerous as W’s lies. All hell has not yet broken loose and may or may not do so later today. But the police are telling the media that they’re preparing for trouble. And Camp Casey 2 ran a workshop yesterday on how to nonviolently respond to hostility. (Watch video on Truthout.org.)

Huge numbers of supporters of Cindy Sheehan read more

PHOTOS FROM THIS MORNING OF BUSES ARRIVING AT CAMP CASEY 2

PHOTOS HERE

PHOTOS HERE

Leaders and members of Military Families Speak Out spoke out in Crawford today, and Joan Baez led the crowd (which is clearly well over 1,000, if not 2,000, just at Camp Casey 2) in “Amazing Grace”. MFSO spoke in support of getting out of Iraq NOW – not months from now, but before another life is lost to a war started by chicken hawks.

PHOTOS HERE

Iraq Veterans Against the War are on stage now.

And now Cindy’s on stage and can’t start speaking, and nobody can hear read more

Cindy Sheehan just spoke and said she’d finally figured out what the noble cause was. Bush, she said, wants to kill more American soldiers because he’s already killed so many. That’s the reason.

When Bush started this war, Cindy said, he said “You’re with us or you’re against us.” Well, Cindy said, Mr. President, WE’RE AGAINST YOU!

Cindy also spoke to the members of the media who have been smearing her and her family. “Smear away,” read more

Sheehan Breakthroughs, Unbridgeable Divides, and Taboos Unbroken
By David Swanson

The Washington Post today wondered out loud whether Cindy Sheehan might be a “catalyst for a muscular antiwar movement.” In translation, this is an assertion that Cindy Sheehan has already become an accepted reason for the corporate media to finally acknowledge the existence of, and consequently help to build, the antiwar movement. There has, of course, been a major anti-war movement longer than there read more

By David Swanson

Cindy Sheehan has raised the right question: For what noble cause did her son die?

Were the reasons Bush gave Congress for why the war was necessary truthful ones? What did Bush tell Tony Blair three and a half years ago when he invited him, unlike Cindy, in out of the Texas sun?

If anyone can force Bush to answer these questions, or to concede that there are no respectable answers and that the war must end, it is Cindy. She is a remarkable woman. She’s been accused of read more

Solomon’s Unspinning of War
By David Swanson

Norman Solomon’s new book, “War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death,” opens with a disturbing prologue. The U.S. media has refused to give serious coverage to the Downing Street Memos on the grounds that they are “old news.” In the initial pages of his book, and supplemented by the rest, Solomon makes a case that both outdoes and undoes that claim.

Solomon outdoes the “old news” read more

By David Swanson

For the length of next year, the nearly 600,000 residents of Washington, D.C., will continue to pay federal income taxes and to send their kids to die in Iraq (thus far in greater proportion than any other area of the country), but will be deprived of any representation in either house of Congress.

This qualifies as breaking news to the 82 percent of Americans who are unaware that this situation exists and is not new, read more

TV Drama on Iraq Tells Us More About Hollywood
By David Swanson

A significant percentage of the U.S. news stories about Iraq in the past couple of days have been stories about a fictional TV series set in Iraq