"That which you do not resist and mobilize to stop you will learn – or be forced – to accept.”
To the Anti-War Movement in the United States:
Barack Obama is sending a surge of 20,000 troops to Afghanistan.
An antiwar movement that does not move immediately to oppose the Obama doctrine of shifting the central front of the war on terror to Afghanistan, no longer deserves to be called an anti-war movement.read more...
The World Can’t Wait organizes people living in the United States to repudiate and stop the fascist direction initiated by the Bush Regime, including: the murderous, unjust and illegitimate occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan; the global “war of terror” of torture, rendition and spying; and the culture of bigotry, intolerance and greed. This direction cannot and will not be reversed by leaders who tell us to seek common ground with fascists, religious fanatics, and empire. It can only be possible by the people building a community of resistance - an independent mass movement of people - acting in the interests of humanity to stop, and demand prosecution, of these crimes.
World Can't Wait has hit three stops of the Warped Tour; Ventura, Pomona and San Francisco in California. This year, the Warped Tour has a variety of bands .... from older political punks who are in their 30's and 40s' to some Christian punk bands. This drew a variety of age groups, including families who brought their kids out, to youth that came on their own. The demographic was mainly white. Many people were either in the military, came from a military family or had recently joined.
The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) recently reported that the Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Council (OLC) has determined that detainees taken in the U.S. war of terror may be entitled to some constitutional rights if they are tried by military commissions within the United States. (The contents of a leaked May 4th legal memorandum were shared with the WSJ.) In particular OLC told the Obama administration that the detainees may be able to successfully challenge the use of statements made as a result of coercive interrogations. In other words, statements that were the result of torture can not be used to obtain a conviction. This could throw a major monkey wrench into the Obama administration’s plans to possibly try some of the Guantanamo Bay prisoners in the U.S.
July 1 was supposed to be the day that the Justice Department — after two delays — released an unclassified version of the CIA Inspector General’s 2004 Report into the interrogations of “high-value detainees” in the “War on Terror,” which Democrat Congressional staffers described as the “holy grail,” according to Greg Sargent of the Plum Line, writing in May, “because it is expected to detail torture in unprecedented detail and to cast doubt on the claim that torture works.”
On Monday June 8th, Carly Sheehan (whose brother Casey was killed in Iraq) and Rafael from World Can't Wait went to Hayward CA High School as part of the "We Are Not Your Soldiers" tour. Hayward High is a diverse working class school in the Bay Area that recruiters regularly come to. There is also a brand new recruiting station that just opened in Hayward, right next to the junior college.
From Carly Sheehan: "Walking into Mr. Dwyer's class at Hayward High School Monday, I had no idea what to expect from the students I was about to speak to. Speaking for the first time with the "We Are Not Your Soldiers" tour, I didn't know if the students would be receptive to the message of resistance to recruitment and military service. I'm really heartened by what I found." read more
Monday, July 13, The World Can't Wait and other organizations will protest the inclusion of military recruiters at the national NAACP Convention in New York City.
Speaking for the first time since his release from Guantánamo after seven years’ imprisonment without charge or trial, following a successful habeas corpus appeal in January, Mohammed El-Gharani, now a free man in Chad, told Mohamed Vall of al-Jazeera, in an exclusive interview, how he felt about being imprisoned from the age of 14 to the age of 21. “Seven of the most beautiful years of youth were lost in prison,” he said. “I couldn’t learn or work. Seven years were just lost — for nothing.” Recounting the torture he experienced, which I reported last April in my article, “Guantánamo’s forgotten child: the sad story of Mohammed El-Gharani,” Mohammed also revealed, for the first time, that the interrogators in Guantánamo tried to force him to spy on his fellow prisoners.