John Lindsay-Poland's blog

I am looking at large black-and-white photographs taken in 1945 in Japan, given to me last week at the Japan Peace Conference. The images show intimacy – a woman suckling her baby, both bleeding; a nurse looking on as a man removes maggots from an older woman’s burns. The woman is crying out. But the looks in people’s eyes seem distant, as if they’d seen something much further than we know.

The stillness in these stark pictures doesn’t explain the restless energy of the peace movement I witnessed in Japan. Relations between the US and Japan are at an impressive moment: Japanese voters have been throwing out leaders who have submitted to US government demands for keeping military bases on the southern island of Okinawa and elsewhere in the country. There is a strong sentiment for re-framing the overall US-Japan Security Agreement.

President Obama was forced to address the growing clamor in South America opposing plans for U.S. military use of bases in Colombia to carry out regional operations with a wide and ambiguous mandate. “We have no intent in establishing a U.S. military base in Colombia,” Obama said on Friday.

But whether the bases are "U.S." in name is of no import. The proposal has always been for U.S. military use of national bases in Colombia, which is how the U.S. works at military bases in Honduras, Ecuador, El Salvador, and many other countries in the world. The Pentagon does not acknowledge “U.S. bases” in Iraq, for example. Obama’s announcement doesn’t change anything of what has bothered so many Latin Americans and U.S. citizens who hoped for better from Obama’s government.

A military coup took place in Honduras on Sunday, June 28, led by School of the Americas (SOA) graduate Romeo Vasquez. In the early hours of the day, members of the Honduran military surrounded the presidential palace and forced the democratically elected president, Manuel Zelaya, into custody. He was immediately flown to Costa Rica.

A national vote had been scheduled to take place today in Honduras to consult the electorate on a proposal of holding a Constitutional Assembly in November.  General Vasquez had refused to comply with this vote and was deposed by the president, only to later be reinstated by the Congress and Supreme Court.

Two hundred people from all over the United States and a dozen other nations around the world gathered at American University in Washington, DC lst weekend, as part of the organizing conference on foreign military bases, dubbed “Security without Empire.” I was on the organizing committee for the event, spoke on Friday night about US nonviolent strategies for resisting foreign bases, and co-led a workshop on doing research.

The conference came at a propitious time. President Obama said the day we began that he “intends” to withdraw all US troops and contractors from Iraq by December 31, 2011. Though “intent” offers some wiggle room, this is a new promise around which the peace movement can and should organize. At least as important, as Raed Jarrar elucidated in the conference, this 2011 withdrawal date is required by the agreement signed by Iraq and the United States and ratified by the Iraqi parliament. If Washington is to honor democracy and law in Iraq, all US troops and bases must leave.

We don’t have to go all the way to Colombia or Gaza to see executions of civilians using US tax dollars, we know that. But it is rare that a video of a killing by white police of a black man lying facing down on the ground brings that killing into our own experience. For some, it brings back their own experiences of police brutality.

On New Years Eve, the trains ran late into the night in San Francisco and Oakland. At Fruitvale station in Oakland, transit police pulled people off a train after reports of a fight. Those still on the train caught what happened next on cell phone video footage. Three cops have young men sitting on the platform, their hands behind their backs, possibly handcuffed. They take one of the men, Oscar Grant, and get him face down on the pavement. One of the cops has his knee on Grant’s back. Another stands up, takes his gun from his holster, and fires it into Grant’s back. Grant died that night in the hospital. The video shows the cops then moving other detained young men away from the bleeding body of Grant. Not long after, according to several reports, the police went onto the train and confiscated cell phones from passengers, in what clearly appears to be an attempt to hide or destroy evidence.

Surveillance of FOR Colombia Team Exposed;
Human Rights Groups Join FOR in Demanding Investigation

FOR and leading human rights organizations last week released letters to U.S. Ambassador William Brownfield and Colombian Attorney General Mario Iguarán condemning the electronic monitoring of humanitarian groups. Colombian media sources revealed this month that the Colombian government had secretly intercepted communications to and from more than 150 e-mail addresses used by human rights activists, journalists, academics, and labor organizers for the past two years. The letter was signed by leaders of FOR, Amnesty International, Latin America Working Group, Human Rights First, Washington Office on Latin America and ten other human rights organizations.

Surveillance of FOR Colombia Team Exposed;
Human Rights Groups Join FOR in Demanding Investigation

After watching this shocking story - just one of thousands - please take action today! Demand that Congress immediately end all funding to the abusive Colombian military. Click here to send a message to your member of Congress.

I have the same feeling as on 9/11, when I was in Washington, D.C. One hundred eighty dead civilians and more than 300 wounded from an indiscriminate attack on a highly visible set of targets. Except this time, I am in country I don't know, where I don't speak the language of most -- only the colonial language. Today, on a train I talked with five men who wanted to discuss terrorism. For them, it was about Muslim terrorism. One man said that Gandhi was the black spot of India, because he encouraged Muslims not to leave at the time of partition, and so India now has 20-25% Muslim population. According to these men, Muslims and Hindus cannot live together. I questioned -- are you talking about 200 million Muslims, or just the 20 who carried out the terror operation in Mumbai on Wednesday night, with perhaps the support of another 100 people?

Colombian Army commander Mario Montoya resigned Tuesday, in the wake of a scandal over army killings of civilians that a United Nations official on Saturday called “widespread and systematic.” A protégé of the United States, Montoya was an architect of the “body count” counterinsurgency strategy that many analysts believe led to the systematic civilian killings. His record is full of reports of collaboration with paramilitary units, from the 1970s into the 2000s. 

The Fellowship of Reconciliation believes General Montoya’s departure because of criticism of his human rights record reflects an important step in the effort to make human rights a central measure for military officers’ performance. We urge Colombian authorities to pursue all relevant investigations of crimes committed under General Montoya’s command.