Another Example of Congressional Skulduggery

David Swanson caught this bit of news about the U.S.’s base Iraq policy:

When the House and the Senate pass similar but not identical bills, they create a conference committee to work out the differences. When they both passed amendments to the “emergency supplemental” spending bill stipulating that none of the money could be used to build permanent bases in Iraq, the conference committee, behind closed doors this week, resolved that non-difference by deleting it.

Ain’t that just the way you learned about how Congress works back in your civics class? Doesn’t it just make you feel like exporting Democracy?

Last month I reproduced some of Ray Gingerich’s criticisms of the Religious Freedom Peace Tax Fund Act and its advocates. Timothy Godshall of the National Campaign for a Peace Tax Fund responds:

I doubt that the existence of the Peace Tax Fund decreases people’s interest in war tax resistance. I would think that, on the whole, our work to educate people on how their taxes are spent would heighten their consciences to this issue and perhaps lead some to resist payment of war taxes.

When I present on the Peace Tax Fund, I always talk about the existing war tax resistance movement, and I refer people to NWTRCC to learn about how to practice war tax resistance. I am a war tax resister myself.

As in many social movements, there is the more radical, civil disobedience side of things, and there is the safer, legislative side of things. It seems logical to me to give people a wide range of options for how to be involved.

Perhaps you already noticed this evidence of the batshit insanity at the front of the parade: After three prisoners at Guantánamo were “found hanged” there recently, Rear Admiral Harry B. Harris Jr., who runs the joint, said of these reported suicides (and I am not making this up):

They have no regard for life, neither ours nor their own. I believe this was not an act of desperation, but an act of asymmetrical warfare waged against us.

A while back I posted a few links to examples of some of the new directions anti-war protest is taking these days. Among these were protests targeting the homes of such figures as Donald Rumsfeld and John Negroponte (who is also being well-hounded at his public appearances).

Jim Macdonald has written up a defense of the tactic of demonstrating at the homes of “policy makers responsible for various war and economic crimes.”

Also, here is another report from the Port of Olympia resistance against shipments of military cargo to Mosul by the 3^rd Stryker Brigade. (The Olympia Indymedia site has even more.)

And, following up to my report on the Oakland Army recruitment center protests last month, I’m delighted to report that the recruitment center was again shut down last week — this time in a daring surprise daylight raid by an army of clowns!

A bewildered Army recruiter looks on as the Clandestine Insurgent Rebel Clown Army performs their “trying to come to consensus” sketch

Photo by Matt Leonard