A few people sitting-in then seeking release from custody the same day is not civil disobedience.

7 people sitting-in and being released and/or bailed out 90 minutes later is filler for the nightly news and revenue for the city.

Cook County, usually near or over capacity, would have been incapacitated had one thousand people sat in and refused bail if and when arrested. Shouldn’t the point of civil disobedience be disrupting business as usual not enriching it?

deborahvk

Deborah Van Kleef sings her song, “Talking Health Care” from her new CD, Work in Progress. For more info on her music, go to (http://deborahvankleef.com/). For more on the issue, see (http://www.uhcan.org/ ) Universal Health Care Action Network.

John I. Laun, Colombia Support Network, 2 October 2009

I have a recurring question: Why do the major media in this country so often get Colombia so wrong?

A recent example of media coverage confirms my concern. Lisa Logan, identified as CBS News chief foreign correspondent, reported that Colombian Special Operations Forces would soon be sent to Afghanistan to help the U.S. defeat the Taliban there. Ms. Logan began her account by stating that the “battle tested” Colombian commandos had gained their experience “from having defeated terrorists in their own country”. Except they have not done so: the FARC and ELN guerrillas continue to have several thousand armed personnel in the country. And the paramilitary forces, classified as “terrorists” by the U.S. State Department on September 10, 2001, are active in substantial numbers throughout Colombia. In many instances they have acted in concert with units of the Colombian Army, which has itself engaged in massacres, forced displacement and extrajudicial executions on a wide scale, as detailed in a CSN report elsewhere on this website. While Ms. Logan rapturously proclaims that the Colombian Army is composed of “some of the finest soldiers in the world”, she fails to mention the Army’s widespread kidnapping of youths to kill them and present them falsely as “guerrillas killed in combat”, so as to earn rewards promised for dead guerrillas in a Ministry of National Defense document (the so-called “false positives” scandal).

[Read the article]

Rekha Basu, DesMoinesRegister.com, 7 October 2009

On Saturday, former Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf made a visit to Clive, flanked by a phalanx of U.S.-government supplied secret servicemen. In a lavish private reception, a senator, congressman and former governor welcomed the former military general, who seized power in a 1999 coup and resigned under pressure last year. He used the occasion to call for massive, open-ended U.S. military warfare on Afghanistan to rout terrorism.

On Tuesday, with no security forces in tow, a young Afghan woman who goes by the pseudonym Zoya slipped into Des Moines to speak at a public library. A member of the underground Revolutionary Association of Women of Afghanistan (RAWA), which has been in the vanguard of resistance to the Taliban, she shields her real name for fear of being targeted.

[Cont. reading ‘The time to leave Afghanistan is now’]

Related:
Rekha Basu: Out of tragedy, a revolutionary is born