Stop Loss is a song by Army Specialist and Iraq war veteran Marc Hall. He’s in some major trouble for this song. He’s been in jail since December 11th for singing and recording this song.  Original music should be protected by the First Amendment but isn’t for people in the Army.

“[Stop Loss is] a song that expresses his anger over the Army’s stop-loss policy.

Stop-loss is a policy that allows the Army to keep soldiers active beyond the end of their signed contracts. According to the Pentagon, more than 120,000 soldiers have been affected by stop-loss since 2001, and currently 13,000 soldiers are serving under stop-loss orders.

Hall, (aka hip hop artist Marc Watercus), who is in the Army’s 3rd Infantry Division, was placed in Liberty County Jail for the song in which he angrily denounces the continuing policy that has barred him from exiting the military. [It's about the draft, (hidden in plain site) in other words.]

Military service members do not completely give up their rights to free speech, particularly not when they are doing so artistically while off duty, as was the case with Hall. He is charged under Article 134 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice, which covers “all disorders and neglects to the prejudice of good order and discipline” and “all conduct of a nature to bring discredit upon the armed forces.” The military is claiming that he “communicated a threat” with his song. Hall mailed a copy of the song to the Pentagon after the Army unilaterally extended his contract for a second Iraq deployment.

Read more here at Truthout. Don’t be fooled for a second thinking that we don’t have a draft in the U.S. — but it’s only for those in the Army, caught in the net of the active military currently serving.  The song is also seemingly a threat, or is it just a statement of fact?

Download or listen to the song here.  (It’s explicit.)

Obama is being influenced by his bad angels, listening to the wrong people, and doing the wrong things in Afghanistan and in Pakistan. Giving him the Nobel Peace Prize for this was a mistake.

The drone attacks he orders are horrifying and illegal, killing innocent people even as they execute a few “real” targets.   The escalation of his war will not bring peace. Unfortunately, this war will drag on and on and on without the American people protesting it. There might not be a draft, but there are 56,000 contractors headed for Afghanistan too. . . . privatizing our military force in the Middle East even further, even as our peace/war president plans a “surge”.

Not only are another 30,000 troops being deployed to Afghanistan, “but also 56,000 military contractors will join them.”

Militarism grows and grows, even as we let other things go, like real health care reform, serious climate change work and the smart grid, etc.

An analysis of Obama’s Nobel speech and the “Just War”  and “Just Peace” theories is here.  I don’t buy it. I think no war that kills civilians, and keeps on killing civilians, can be anything but just another war.  Unless this war is solving some serious problem or threat, (and it’s not) we need to leave.

A good angel would know this.

This episode contains part of a protest rally including speakers Dennis Kucinich, Ralph Nader and Cynthia McKinney, and it also contains bits of President Obama’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech.

Get involved, contact your President and your Congressmen and tell them to stop this stupid war.  It might be the end of us if we don’t. War is still a racket.

Download this episode here, or subscribe on the right.
Artwork by Jay Long.

Respected journalist Amy Goodman was finally able to give her talk in Vancouver, Canada, in late November, 2009, after and despite serious harassment by Canadian police. She discussed this on her show Democracy Now in late November, but this is the actual talk. She discussed health care, her mother’s health care before death, media, Obama, Afghanistan, our military, feminism, and more. It’s often funny too.

She also talks about how she feels getting involved and dissent are very important. It’s an incredible talk, very revealing as she talks about her mother, and completely unedited.

Great line (among many): “What do I think of the mainstream media? I think it would be a good idea.”

“Information is power”, she said, something any student of journalism could tell you instinctively, but something many people don’t usually think about.

Download here or subscribe on the right.

Credit for the original recording: Radio4all.net

Music: (I Wish I Had a) Wooden Heart, by David Holmes

Sami Rasouli

Sami Rasouli, a well known Iraqi-American peace activist, traveled to central Minnesota last week and gave us an update on Iraq.   Iraqis need our help, and a lot of things need a lot of work in Iraq. They also need peace building and better relations with American citizens. He drops a couple of mostly unknown bits of info too, like that most of the scientists in Iraq were deliberately killed by Israeli intelligence (Mossad) during the war.

Shockingly, he said that Iraqis learned from John Wayne movies, not George Bush Sr., that America is a culture of force and violence. We have to reverse this perception. Learn more in this episode of Civilianism, which you can download here or subscribe to on the right.

There are two articles related to the topics in this podcast. One is “Oil Billions and Weapons of Mass Deception in Iraq” which you can read here, and the other is “Huge Rise in Birth Defects in Falluja” which you can read here.

The organizations that Sami Rasouli hopes you will check out and become involved in are found here:

The Iraq and American Reconciliation Project (IARP)  and the Muslim Peacemaker Team.

You can get involved as easily as helping to buy water sanitation equipment in Iraq, which is very much needed.

Besides devastating climate change, my 3 everyday concerns are: Health care reform, which we badly need, the Palestine-Israel conflict and when will it be over, and when will the wars the U.S. is in finally end? We need these things resolved. Obama has been President 9 months now, it’s time he fixed some of these monumental problems. That’s what he was elected to do! This podcast contains recordings about these 3 issues.

Hear Greg Palast, and Judge Goldstone on his Report about war crimes, and a very special “guest”.

For more information about all of the topics covered in this episode, see Civilianism News.

Of course, my biggest concern is still climate change. See Futurism Now Radio and Futurism Now for more information on that.

On Sept 9th, Israeli human rights group B’Tselem published its findings on the number of Palestinians and Israelis killed in Operation Cast Lead in the Gaza Strip.

According to B’Tselem’s research, Israeli security forces killed 1,387 Palestinians during the course of the three-week operation. Of these, 773 did not take part in the hostilities, including 320 minors and 109 women over the age of 18. Of those killed, 330 took part in the hostilities, and 248 were Palestinian police officers, most of whom were killed in aerial bombings of police stations on the first day of the operation. . . . .

B’Tselem’s figures, the result of months of meticulous investigation and cross-checks with numerous sources, sharply contradict those published by the Israeli military. However, B’Tselem visited homes and gathered death certificates, photos, and testimonies relating to all 252 children under 16, and has the details of 111 women over 16 killed.

The purpose of the presentation was to educate the public, but unfortunately the public does not attend these events; the people who already know what is going on do. Here are some recent facts they presented:

• The U.S. donates $23,000+ to every Israeli citizen in Israel, every year.
• In 2006, the Jewish settlement in Palestine total was 40 million, and the U.S. paid for it.
• In 2006 the total U.S. allocation to Israel from the U.S. was $4.36 billion, which we paid for.
• Israel took 95,989 acres of Palestinian land in 2006. We pay for this. We also pay for the wall, which snakes around strategically to cut off families and towns.
• The Berlin wall was only 96 miles long. The Israeli wall is planned to be 403 miles long, and it has nothing to do with preventing terrorists from entering Israel.
• Palestinians cannot even use Israeli roads, and their license plates mark them as Palestinians, which is a racist mark. These facts are just a few of many this CP team presented. At the end of the recording is an interesting Q & A also.

You can listen to this presentation of their experiences in Palestine last year by clicking here (opens a podcast file in a new window).

B’Tselem, which said it had carried out “months of meticulous investigation and cross-checks with numerous sources” has, unlike the Israel Defence Forces (IDF), made public the names of all those it said were killed in the war. It said that since the IDF had refused to furnish the agency with its own detailed list, it was impossible to compare the names but that “the blatant discrepancy between the numbers is intolerable.”

The new figures came as it emerged that the Israel Defence Forces have opened a criminal investigation into allegations by Khaled Abed Rabbo and his mother Suad that three of his daughters were shot – two fatally – as the family, carrying a white flag, walked from their house in eastern Jabalya on January 7, early in the military’s ground offensive.

Mr Abed Rabbo testified – including to The Independent two weeks later – that his mother, who was waving a white headscarf, his wife and the three girls were outside the house when a soldier emerged from a tank and opened fire killing Amal, two, Suad, seven, and severely wounding a third, Samar, four, who was evacuated to Belgium for medical treatment.”

Read more here