Anti-War Revalations

[American Patriot]

Another Iraq War Teach-in
Accuracy in Academia ^ | July 13, 2006 | Matthew Murphy

College students accustomed to hearing news on the Iraq War from professors and protesters who have never actually been there might find the documents retrieved by the U.S. forces there to be of interest.

Thomas Joscelyn, a terrorism researcher, told the audience that “It shouldn’t really be a surprise to us,” about Saddam’s relationship with Islamic terrorist groups, including Al Qaeda and Osama Bin Laden.

Michael Tanji the former Chief of the Document and Media Exploitation Division at the Defense Intelligence Agency said that “the sheer size of this problem is something people really don’t appreciate.”

When it comes to the intelligence agencies ability to examine these documents more and especially translating those, Tanji stated, “You don’t have a lot of people and you don’t have a lot of expertise.”

The question did arise about whether or not the documents being released were being done so by the Bush administration to strengthen their case for war against Iraq. Thomas Joscelyn said that it was not the case, since the Bush administration had been trying to keep the documents classified rather than declassifying.

No one said that these documents would, could or will make or break the case for going to war with Iraq. What they will do is help the American people get a better understanding of life during the Saddam regime. Just as in World War II and the Germans, America has the opportunity to see life as it truly was in a country ruled by a dictator.

On July 11th, Representative Peter Hoekstra, who is Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, spoke at the Heritage Foundation about documents from pre-war Iraq. These documents go beyond what the Iraqi Survey Group has compiled since they were “limited in their ability” of collecting information about pre-war Iraq because of the “security situation” that exists as the fighting continues in the country.

Representative Hoekstra argued that the intelligence community and American people should “peel back the layers” when it comes to these documents, especially since they give “greater insight into” the mind and world of the Saddam regime. The documents, which are in 48,000 boxes, also include audio files as well as videos.

Hoekstra realizes that many of the documents aren’t smoking guns. “I realize the limitations of what we’ll find in these documents,” he said. He also noted that “the really good stuff” was probably destroyed before or during the American military strike.

Still, Hoekstra is an advocate for releasing many of the documents for the American public to see. He had noted that 37% of the documents that have been reviewed so far have been stamped classified; these include police documents that date back three to four years and are not translated into English. Hoekstra does believe that there are some classified documents that need to remain classified, solely because of the brutal nature of them, including video footage of prisoners being tortured and murdered.

Representative Hoekstra admits that studying and releasing these documents is “no longer a priority of the intelligence community.” He believes that future studying of the documents will be found in the “cottage industry,” or private sector.

“I believe there is still much we do not know about pre-war Iraq,” Hoekstra stated. “There maybe additional stuff in these documents that might give insight to what Iraqis thought of the future.”

Matthew Murphy is an intern at Accuracy in Academia.

[American Patriot]

Please use this thread to show various Anti-War protests, articles and the like. We should be showing connections these people have as well.

[American Patriot]

Understanding the International Solidarity Movement-What you don’t know can kill you.
FrontPageMagazine.com ^ | FrontPageMagazine.com | July 14, 2006 | Lee Kaplan

Upon being ordered deported by the Tel Aviv district court by Judge Drora Pilpel on Sunday, Paul LaRudee said from his holding cell: "Am I a security threat to Israel?”

The question was rhetorical, but the answer is not: “Yes!”

Paul LaRudee is the leader of the International Solidarity Movement chapter in the San Francisco Bay Area and one of the ISM’s most active leaders in the USA. As such, he is responsible for recruiting and training radicals and anti-Semites, anyone he can get to help bring down the state of Israel by supporting Fatah, Hamas, Islamic Jihad and the PFLP. The doe-eyed piano tuner who maintains his innocence and calls himself a “peace activist” is in fact working to advance the cause of Palestinian jihadism. And the worst thing is this episode is not over yet despite Judge Pilpel’s wise decision; Israel allows for an appeal of his deportation order.

I dyed my skin and colored my hair and made myself look like a Pakistani Muslim in 2004 to attend an ISM training session in the San Francisco Bay Area that Paul LaRudee personally oversaw. I listened to a colleague of LaRudee’s, Jess Ghannam, of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC), a Hamas supporting front group, give an orientation speech in which he claimed in 1948 the Jews sought to drive the Arabs into the sea and that Muslim and Christian Israeli citizens do not have the right to vote, own property or run their own businesses. The ADC, funded by Arab interests, helps support the ISM in the US.

One thing made clear during training was that if caught trying to enter Israel as human shields for terrorist groups, we should refuse deportation because a lawyer would be provided free of charge to us. The goal was to tax the resources of the Jewish state in any way possible. We were told that, once we were in the West Bank, we should get ourselves arrested with an Arab because as internationals the police would be reluctant to keep us in jail for long, and if we refused to leave without the Arab prisoner “in solidarity,” they might relent just to get rid of us and let him go too. Never mind what the Arab prisoner did, we were there to overburden the system.

We had nothing to fear from armed terrorists since we coordinated with these groups in advance and would be given safe passage by them. We were told not to tell Arab children not to throw rocks at Israeli soldiers. We were taught “direct action,” civil disobedience and violence that would hamper Israeli security and drain the state’s resources. We were told that we were not there to make peace between two parties; on the contrary, we were there to roil things between Israelis and the Arabs as a step toward making all of Israel into Palestine.

We were given training manuals with a history of the conflict that focused on bringing down western governments like in Israel and America. We were instructed on working in non-hierarchical “affinity groups” so nobody could pinpoint the actual leadership. Thus, LaRudee claims he is not a leader because “the ISM has no leaders.” In fact, he is a driving force behind their movement in the San Francisco Bay Area.

The average Israeli and American does not know the damage that someone like LaRudee does to Israel bit by bit, day by day. In the US, LaRudee and his pals in the International Solidarity Movement organize fundraisers, conferences, phony debates and radio shows portraying Israel as Nazism redux, an apartheid state like South Africa where human rights are trampled and Israeli boys in the IDF shoot Arab children for sport. Their goal is to poison the minds of the next generations of young Americans in the same way the Arabs poison their childrens’ minds to hate the Jews and Israel. LaRudee even recruits kapos to help him in his passion, people of Jewish ancestry who worship the political god of radical Communism or Anarchism.

LaRudee's visit to the Holy Land is to facilitate ISM activities with the new Hamas government and other PLO leadership. Even as LaRudee appeals deportation after getting caught, another ISM activist named Hannah Mermelstein snuck in elsewhere. The Shin Bet and Border Police need to develop a special task force to catch ISM activists who enter the territories and expel them immediately. Israel may fear offending other nations where these subversives come from, but allowing what amounts to a western wing of the PLO free access to Israeli territory under some abstract right of “free movement” involves too high a price for the Jewish state.

[American Patriot]

Campus Sugar Coaters Violate First Amendment
Accuracy in Academia ^ | July 12, 2006 | Laura Ventura

Despite the fact that the majority of courts have struck down speech codes as being unconstitutional for overbreadth and/or vagueness, approximately 351 American universities, both public and private, are still enforcing such codes. This can be seen both in information collected by the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) as well as from the practicing college and university websites. The purpose of speech codes is to protect students from hearing words that may offend them. This protection comes at a high price: our fundamental First Amendment right of freedom of speech.

Although the Supreme Court has never decided a speech code case, the Tinker decision of 1969 provides some indication as to how the court would rule in such a case. In Tinker v. Des Moines, a few students planned to wear black armbands in protest of the Vietnam War. A source informed the school principals of the student’s plan, and as a result, the principals enacted a policy prohibiting the wearing of armbands. The students wore the armbands anyway and the school suspended them.

In its decision, the Court noted, “…it can hardly be argued that either students or teachers shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the school house gate.” The only reason for suspending the students was the school officials’ concern over the armbands possibly causing a disturbance. The Court, however, pointed out that “undifferentiated fear or apprehension of disturbance is not enough to overcome the right of freedom of expression.” The court held the limitation on free speech to be unconstitutional because there was no evidence that “might reasonably have led school authorities to forecast substantial disruption or material interference with school activities.” Thus the Tinker test emerged.

A noteworthy case that applied the Tinker test to invalidate a speech code is that of Saxe v. State College Area School District (2001) written by Supreme Court Justice Alito while he was on the 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals. In Saxe, students and their guardians challenged the constitutionality of the anti-harassment policy imposed by the school district. The policy defined harassment as:

Harassment means verbal or physical conduct based on one’s actual or perceived race, religion, color, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, disability, or other personal characteristics, and which has the purpose or effect of substantially interfering with a student’s educational performance or creating an intimidating, hostile or offensive environment. Examples of harassment given by the policy are “any unwelcome verbal, written or physical conduct which offends, denigrates or belittles an individual because of any of the characteristics described above.”

The students and their guardians filed the case against the school district because the students feared that if they spoke out against homosexuality and declared it a sin, that their acts would be punishable under the anti-harassment policy. The district court previously declared that the anti-harassment policy only included acts which state and federal law already prohibited; therefore, the district court dismissed the claim. The Court of Appeals, however, disagreed.

The Court of Appeals noted that “there is no categorical ‘harassment exception’ to the First Amendment’s free speech clause.” The court further stated that “there is also no question that the free speech clause protects a wide variety of speech that listeners may consider deeply offensive, including statements that impugn another’s race or national origin or that denigrate religious beliefs.” The court cited the Supreme Court decision of Texas v. Johnson, “if there is a bedrock principle underlying the First Amendment, it is that the government may not prohibit the expression of an idea simply because society finds the idea offensive or disagreeable.” The court went as far as to say the policy “strikes at the heart of moral and political discourse.”

Laura Ventura, a law student at Indiana University-Indianapolis, is an intern at Accuracy in Academia.