Text Fwd: reducing US troops in europe and asia

* Text fwd from Stephanie Westbrook on Jan. 24, 2011


A poll from the New York Times and CBS News:
http://s3.amazonaws.com/nytdocs/docs/562/562.pdf

55% of US citizens polled chose reducing troops in Europe and Asia as a way to cut military spending.

42. If you HAD to choose ONE, which of the following changes to military spending would
you prefer in order to reduce the federal budget deficit: 1. reducing the size of the army and
other branches of the military, OR 2. reducing the number of American troops stationed in
Europe and Asia, OR 3. eliminating some major weapons programs, OR 4. reducing the pay
and benefits of non-combat military personnel and veterans?

Reduce size of Military branches : 7

Reduce troops in Europe/Asia: 55

Eliminate weapons programs : 19

Reduce pay of veterans: 12

DK/ NA : 7

Text Fwd: TomDispatch Audio and Video : Way Off Base

* Informed from Corazon Valdez Fabros on Jan. 11, 2011

Tom Dispatch blog
Jan. 7, 2011
Way Off Base

Nick Turse, an award-winning journalist, author, Harvard fellow and frequent TomDispatch contributor, talks about his effort to find the true number of foreign bases the US operates, and whether that number is likely to go up or down.

Click HERE

Text Fwd: Christine Ahn: "Move the Money, Starve the Empire"

* Text sent from J. D. on July, 2010

Foreign Policy In Focus
Move the Money, Starve the Empire

By Christine Ahn, July 1, 2010

June 26 may have been the last day of the U.S. Social Forum (USSF) in Detroit, but it might very well be the emergence of a more powerful antiwar movement in this country.

The U.S. Social Forum is a meeting place for progressive social justice organizations to discuss issues, strategies, and ideas for building a social movement in this country. The sessions on the antiwar and anti-militarism track made several linkages: between the domestic economic crisis and the bloated military budget, the expansion of U.S. bases and the displacement of farmers and indigenous peoples from their land and livelihoods, and the rise of militarism and violence against women.

We can’t address the economic crisis blighting neighborhoods throughout the United States without moving money away from war. That’s the only part of the national budget not being cut. Organizers at the USSF united two disparate sectors. One is comprised of grassroots base-building organizations with multicultural constituencies working to secure jobs, education, and services. The other includes national peace organizations with mostly white, middle-class membership.

These two groups largely organize separately. But they came together at the USSF because working poor people clearly can’t get the jobs and services they need without challenging military spending. Likewise, peace groups can’t end wars without a broad movement challenging the military-industrial complex.

25 Percent Cut

Mike Prokosch is among the organizers of the 25% Solution campaign in Massachusetts, which aims to cut a quarter, or about $250 billion, from the Pentagon and other military agencies and institutions. The campaign wants to redirect this money to social services, education, and job creation, all of which have been slashed in this era of joblessness and foreclosures.

“The military industrial complex is shaping peoples’ choices and lives,” Prokosch says, referring to the cycle of dependency that military bases and institutions generate in towns in which it dominates the local economy. He points to how Dorchester’s high unemployment (which doubled in the last year), cuts in job training for youth job training programs, and surging dropout rates have fueled the military enlistment rates for the city’s youth. And the only sector of the economy that hasn’t been slashed is the military.

“The more the military base grows the more the cycle of dependency grows,” says Prokosch, who has spent his entire life in the cause of peace. He remains clear-eyed about the odds. After all, he reminds us, the U.S. Empire has been growing for over a century and the defense budget for over 60 years. But he remains hopeful of the potential of a broad base of diverse communities across the country working together to take on the military-industrial complex: “If we want to do this, we we’re going to have to build something larger and more powerful than the military industrial complex that can scare Congress more.”

Barbara Lott-Holland, an organizer with the Bus Riders Union of the Labor Community Strategy Center, describes the tremendous militarization of low-income neighborhoods in Los Angeles. “Our neighborhoods are militarized zones in this country,” Lott-Holland says, “terrorized in the name of the war on drugs, the war on gangs, the war on poverty.” She describes how the United States has the largest prison population in the world, with over 2.2 million in prison, of which one million are black men. “There are more black men in prison than there were during slavery.” Many inner cities today require students to go through metal detectors as they enter the school and have police patrolling the hallways and grounds. “More high schools now look like prisons,” says Lott-Holland, and many classrooms in elementary schools in Los Angeles don’t even have windows. Lott-Holland believes that “this country systematically treats youth as criminals,” monitoring every move of brown and black youth from their schools to their neighborhoods.

U.S. Military Abroad

Just as money for jobs, health care, education, and housing is going from taxpayer pockets to feed the military-industrial complex, so is the money for foreign military operations being used to displace farmers and indigenous people in every region of the world. Members of the No U.S. Bases movement described how the over 700 U.S. bases around the world have become sites of conflict between American soldiers and the local population. Meanwhile, the United States continues to expropriate land from farmers and indigenous people to expand or build new bases.

One site of resistance is Guam, also known by its indigenous name, Guahan. An incorporated U.S. territory, Guam is the intended relocation site of 8,000 Marines from Okinawa. Unsurprisingly, the U.S. government didn’t consult the people of the island, a disturbing parallel with the eras of Spanish and Japanese colonialism.

Lisa Natividad of the Guahan Coalition for Peace and Justice explains that the island is very small, only 212 square miles. From top to bottom, the island is 32 miles, and the widest point is eight miles wide. Despite Guam’s small land mass, the United States is still planning to transfer the troops, which will include their families, other military personnel, and the construction of massive infrastructure to accommodate nearly 80,000 people that will occupy nearly 40 percent of the land. According to Natividad, the Department of Defense drafted an environmental impact statement that outlined plans to dredge 72 acres of the reef surrounding the island and reclaiming 2,200 acres of land. “Looking at the legacy of militarism,” Natividad said, “the build-up of the bases will mean worsening health outcomes and shorter lives.” Natividad says there are over 100 Superfund sites on Guam.

Since 2006, Natividad and other women have been informing their community about the impact of this expanded base and drafting comments to be included in the environmental impact assessments. They are also looking to strengthen ties with neighboring islands in Micronesia and in the north, which are also being assessed for occupation and militarization.

U.S. military aid has also been having an impact on the militarization of Colombia and fueling of guerrilla and paramilitary wars. “The history of the Colombian conflict is not separate from U.S complicity,” says Claudia Castellenos, a human rights lawyer from Colombia. Last year, the Colombian government signed an accord with the United States that will permit seven additional U.S. military bases. “The presence of U.S. cooperation signifies the increase militarization,” says Castellenos, “which supports the paramilitaries against the population.” Plan Colombia, the U.S. bilateral aid package that includes military assistance, has coincided with the death and disappearance of thousands of people. Castellanos is working with women’s organizations to establish leadership development schools for their children “because they will decide if they will participate in these wars or not.”

Transnational Feminists Unite

Another potentially strong linkage that emerged was the connection between feminists here in the United States and those working to confront patriarchy and militarism abroad. At a workshop entitled “Transnational Feminist Organizing to Resist Militarism and Empire,” women discussed how militarism is used to rape women, inflict violence on people, contaminate the environment, and strip farmers and peasants of their land and sovereignty. Brazilian feminist Alessandra Ceregetti from the World March of Women, an international feminist grassroots movement, talked about how they promote peace and demilitarization.

Graciela Sanchez of the Esperanza Peace and Justice Center in San Antonio, Texas — home to five U.S. military bases — offers some wisdom on how women might be at the center of organizing against militarism. “We have to learn to do the work as mujeres (women) to change the culture of violence, of war, of hate, of greed toward that of our abuelitas (grandmothers) of love, sharing, compassion, respect, honesty, and truth.”

She also gives a stinging critique of how organizing in this country has been centered and defined by men and by identity politics. “I can’t separate my queer self, my woman self, my working-class-background self, my immigrant-family-from-Mexico self, or my curly-headed self,” says Sanchez. “We can’t separate our identities; we must look at issues holistically and make the connections.”

Toward Ending Empire

On the last day of the USSF, several dozens of major antiwar and social justice groups gathered to discuss how to build a powerful movement to counter the military industrial complex. Organized by Peace Action, War Times, and the Beyond Empire Working Group of Grassroots Global Justice, the morning caucus attracted a multicultural, multi-generational, and multi-issue audience representing a broad swath of the U.S. population to continue conversation on how to move the money from war.

“There’s one imperial strategy,” says Gwyn Kirk of Women for Genuine Security, “And people here and around the world are brought in to support empire.” Veterans from Iraq Veterans Against the War also pointed to the need to bring in veterans, soldiers, and their families as they are the ones also directly impacted by unending wars. A resolution submitted to the National Movement Assembly of the USSF to oppose U.S. wars and militarism urged a focus on October 2010 as a month of solidarity actions.

As we took a group photo, we started with the chant, “End the War,” and then realized that our motto was off. We adjusted it to, “End the Empire.”

# Christine Ahn is a policy and research analyst with the Global Fund for Women and a Foreign Policy In Focus columnist.

Text Fwd: [nousbases] Initial Report - Security Without Empire: U.S. National Organizing Confernece on Military Bases

Fwd from Alfred L. Marder, Joseph Gerson, Agatha Haun on March 18, 2009

[nousbases] Initial Report - Security Without Empire: U.S. National Organizing Confernece on Military Bases

The US Peace Council brought 4 delegates

Al Marder

ANNOUNCEMENT

Security Without Empire: U.S. National Organizing Conference on Military Bases

Initial Report (Prepared by John Lindsay-Poland, Gwyn Kirk, David Vine and Joseph Gerson)



Project on Military Bases Builds Movement to Close Overseas Bases

Opposed to the destructive impacts of U.S. military bases on people in the U.S. and so-called “host nations,” the Project on Military Bases, uniting 17 U.S. organizations, gathered in a national organizing conference at American University February 27 – March 2, entitled “Security without Empire.” The conference was co-sponsored and hosted by American University’s Anthropology Department and brought together more than 200 activists, scholars, and students from the United States and 11 other nations.

Unknown to most people, the Pentagon maintains a global network of some 1,000 military bases outside the 50 states and Washington, DC. An astonishing 268 remain in Germany; 124 in Japan; 87 in South Korea; 89 in Italy; and 57 in the Britain. The precise number of these bases is unknown; even the number of U.S. bases in Britain remains a state secret. The estimated annual net cost of foreign military bases, according to a conference presentation by the Institute for Policy Studies’ Miriam Pemberton, totals around $110 billion a year. The size and impacts of this vast network of U.S. military fortresses are unprecedented in human history and ultimately undermine U.S. security.

Beginning with a ceremony at the Pentagon, the visible locus of U.S. military power, participants brought water from places near their homes, spoke of the sacred places and violent events in their rural and urban communities, and poured this water into one bowl, a symbol of our shared opposition to militarism and visions of a sustainable future based on everyday security. Eastern Shawnee Nation representative Sheila Hansen and other elders graciously accepted participants’ requests to hold the conference on native people’s land.

Conference organizers had four goals: to further integrate networks and organizations from across the United States that are working for the closure and withdrawal of military bases, to develop common strategies, to widen the U.S. movement critical of foreign bases, and to increase the movement’s visibility, including on Capitol Hill.

The conference was organized at a propitious time. On the conference’s opening day, President Obama said he “intends” to withdraw all U.S. troops and contractors from Iraq by December 31, 2011. Though “intent” offers some wiggle room, this is an important promise that people in the United States demanding an end to the war should hold their president to. Also important, as Raed Jarrar, Iraqi representative of the American Friends Service Committee, explained, this 2011 withdrawal date is required by the 2008 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 U.S. troops and bases must leave.

Many in the U.S. are ready for a change. As Zia Mian of Princeton University reported, polls indicate that more than half of the U.S. people are opposed to the war in Afghanistan.

The conference heard from an array of opponents to military bases in the countries that “host” them. Jana Glivicka is a remarkable 21-year-old student and an activist in the movement to prevent the new U.S. military base for missile defense from being installed in the Czech Republic. She summed it up this way: “It’s a weapons system that doesn’t work, aimed at a threat that doesn’t exist, in a country that doesn’t want it.” No wonder the Obama administration is studying whether to proceed with the system. Seventy percent of the Czech population is opposed to it, and the Czech chamber of deputies is expected to vote on it in March.1

Gualdemar Jiménez of Service for Peace and Justice in Ecuador told the crowd about the base in the Pacific port of Manta, set up in 1999 with no public consultation, purportedly to fight the drug trade. This base has been used to sink boats with undocumented immigrants and to support warfare in Colombia. Human rights and peace groups held conferences critical of the base, met with officials and citizens until 2006 when Rafael Correa made non-renewal of the base agreement part of his presidential campaign. When he was elected, these groups held him to his promise, and a constituent assembly inserted a ban on all foreign military presence in the new constitution of Ecuador.

Numerous speakers and participants described how the intrusions and abuses of U.S. military bases have generated a wide variety of campaigns for their closure. The U.S. military plans to expand its operations in Guam, while protesters forced the Navy to stop bombing practice in Vieques, Puerto Rico, in 2003. On both islands the military has produced massive environmental contamination, with serious health consequences, that community advocates seek to clean up safely. In Okinawa and Korea, campaigns have focused on holding the military accountable for violence against women as well as environmental clean-up, while resisting the construction of new bases. Military presence close to home is often experienced as a foreign force as well. Along the U.S.-Mexican border, militarization has led to violent arrests and breakup of families.; activists document these actions and inform targeted people of their rights. The militarization of space is both colossally expensive and an ineffective defense, and a global network of groups holds witness at sites where space weapons are developed. Other activists exposed the impacts of military bases and identify potential allies through research – talking with people in and around bases (from U.S. service members to local workers), requesting documents via the Freedom of Information Act, and using public sources.

As well as plenaries and workshop discussions, an “anti-military fashion show” -- a creative popular education strategy -- demonstrated with great panache how militarism has entered our everyday culture, our social lives and dress, and also how some resist it. (See www.commondreams.org/view/2009/03/10-5 for an illustrated account.)

Most conference participants were under no illusions that the new administration in Washington is ready to re-define security in terms of meeting social, economic and environmental needs. But more than 20 meetings with Congressional staff on Capitol Hill on Monday, March 2, still provided some jarring moments: Although Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA) as chair of the House Financial Services Committee, has proposed a dramatic 25% cut in the military budget, he also supports the war and U.S. escalation in Afghanistan, for which U.S. bases in Kyrgyzstan and Pakistan are considered critical assets. Moreover, senior staff for the House Armed Services Committee told a delegation that committee members hope to expand the U.S. military presence in Europe.

Enzo Cascati and Annetta Reams from Vicenza, Italy are having none of it. Although the Berlusconi government has embraced construction of a new base in this beautiful old city (a UNESCO heritage site) that will facilitate the war in Iraq, more than 95% of local people recently voted against it in a non-binding referendum. Many will take more dramatic nonviolent action if construction goes forward, which could occur in the coming months.

Phyllis Bennis, the final keynote speaker, balanced her assessment of the new administration’s commitment to war in Afghanistan and plans for a slow withdrawal in Iraq with a hopeful call for activists to seize this historical moment to put the United States on a path toward peace and genuine security. She stressed how bases are connected to so many other major issues—from the environment and energy policy to torture, violence against women, war profiteering, and affordable housing—that anti-base activists must reach out to activists in these movements to make militarism a part of their platforms. In the midst of a financial crisis, she said, the more than $100 billion we spend each year on foreign bases provides the money we need to begin to meet our pressing domestic and international needs.

Throughout the conference was an understanding of the importance of working for more than closing specific bases, or even all foreign military installations, as these bases are the manifestation of a militarized society, economy and culture and of imperial missions, that must themselves be reconsidered. Without such a transformation, U.S. foreign bases that are closed will move elsewhere, or wars will be launched with advanced technology from bases within the United States, or the U.S. will seek to impose its will through legal and economic means, or we will find that wars are waged domestically on women’s bodies, on immigrants of color, on the earth.

Where to from here?

For many people in the United States, overseas bases are invisible, and few know of the pernicious consequences of maintaining 1,000 foreign military bases. The coalition formed around this conference is calling on members of Congress to hold hearings to examine the U.S. overseas basing structure and begin to plan a significant reduction.

There are also efforts to support campaigns specific to the communities and countries impacted by US bases. For information on these campaigns, see the Project on Military Bases web site (www.projectonmilitarybases.org)

The International Network of Women Against Militarism will hold its 7th international meeting in Guam in September 2009 to support resistance against the military buildup planned for the island as well as sharing information and strategies from other nations, especially in the Asia-Pacific. For information, contact: info@genuinesecurity.org

For material from the conference, go to www.projectonmilitarybases.org.

Individuals may also be informed by an international list-serve, nousbases@lists.riseup.net, of news on foreign military bases and movements that resist them. Go to www.riseup.net to subscribe.

Contact the Project on Military Bases, Joseph Gerson, JGerson@afsc.org, 617-661-6130, 617-216-0576.

Organizations participating in the Project on Military Bases include: After Downing Street, American Friends Service Committee, American University Department of Anthropology, Campaign for Peace and Democracy, Code Pink, Fellowship of Reconciliation, Global Network Against Weapons and Nuclear Power in Space, Granny Peace Brigade/No Bases, Institute for Policy Studies, Peace Action, International Network for the Abolition of Foreign Military Bases, International Women’s Network Against Militarism, PANA Institute for Leadership Development and Study of Pacific, Asian and North American Religion at Pacific Institute of Religion, Southwest Workers’ Union, United for Peace and Justice, U.S. Peace Council , Veterans for Peace, and Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom.

Text Fwd: 60th NATO Anniversary Celebrations in Europe

* Image source/caption from*

Space4Peace(Organizing Notes)Feb. 19, 2009

The people of Vicenza, Italy have vigorously opposed plans for a new US air base in their community

130 Czech mayors rallied in Brussels yesterday at the European Union in opposition to US plans for a Star Wars radar base in their country


60th NATO Anniversary Celebrations in Europe to Draw Massive Protests,
By Bruce Gagnon Feb. 19, 2009

2009 is the 60th anniversary of NATO and the US-led alliance is planning big celebrations in Europe to promote their expanded global role as an extension of US foreign and military policy. In 1999, seeking to justify its existence after the collapse of the former Soviet Union, NATO acknowledged that it was seeking to orient itself according to a new fundamental strategic concept. From a narrow military defense alliance it was to become a broad-based alliance for the protection of the vital resource needs (oil/natural gas/etc) of its member states. Besides being mired in Afghanistan today, NATO is now expanding eastward as a tool in the aggressive US program to surround resource rich Russia. There are even discussions now within NATO to take the alliance into the Asian-Pacific to help the US militarily surround China.

From April 3-5, 40 heads of state and government leaders, including President Obama, will come to Strasbourg, France and Baden-Baden, Germany for 60th anniversary events. In response to these events activists from throughout Europe are planning protests in Strasbourg during the period of April 1-5. In order to plan these events 500 activists from 19 countries met at Marc Bloch University in Strasbourg, on February 14-15.

The No to War - No to NATO coalition issued a statement after their meeting that reads in part: "60 years are more than enough – this is the consensus uniting the participants of the peace, anti-globalization movements, leftist parties and organizations, Trade Unions, and student initiatives. They stand against the war policy of NATO, against today's wars in Afghanistan and the Middle East, against the intervention strategy and reinforce their claim to 'No to NATO'. They refuse to accept the EU linked with NATO and ask for a drastic reduction of military spending: we do not want to pay for your crisis , nor for your wars."

NATO of course is responding by trying to keep the protests away from Strasbourg. They have arranged for the city government to outlaw protests. In response No to NATO says, "We want to express our rejection of this kind of politics and want to give the citizens of Strasbourg and the social movements the opportunity to publicize their rejection without any obstacles. These are the demands for the prefecture which turned down the proposal of the NATO Preparatory Committee to demonstrate against NATO in the inner city of Strasbourg on 4th of April. The implementation of the NATO Summit will turn Strasbourg into a fortress; this is not acceptable for its own citizens and for the thousands of peaceful demonstrators form all parts of the world.

"Extraordinary security parameters will be enacted: the establishment of a red zone, the labeling of the citizens, the establishment of an all-encompassing new video surveillance system. For us this staging of heads of states in the city centre of Strasbourg – a closed off city – and its inhabitants who will be unable to have a normal daily life, having no freedom of movement, is unbearable and makes it impossible for us to unveil NATO's real face. Whereas the citizens will pay for the summit and the glorified presentation of NATO their dissenting opinion is to be marginalized."

For activists back here in the US it should be reassuring and exciting for us to see so much effort being organized to shut down the US empire. But we have to do our part as well. We can start by calling for the closing of US bases and for major cuts by Congress in the Pentagon's bloated budget. None of us have to do this on our own. When we work together as a globalized movement we can really begin to make progress.

These are the kinds of issues that will be featured at the upcoming Security Without Empire: National Organizing Conference on Foreign Military Bases that will be held at American University in Washington DC on February 27-March 2. The Global Network will be one of 20 peace groups sponsoring this important event. Key peace movement activists from around the US and all over the world will be attending and presenting. A protest vigil at the Pentagon will kick off the weekend beginning at 4:00 pm on February 27.

For registration information see the conference web site at: www.projectonmilitarybases.org

Global Network Against Weapons & Nuclear Power in Space
PO Box 652
Brunswick, ME 04011
(207) 443-9502
http://www.space4peace.org
globalnet@mindspring.com
http://space4peace.blogspot.com (Blog)

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Text Fwd: MORE ON MILITARY BASES CONFERENCE

* Image from the original source* Pyeongtaek

MORE ON MILITARY BASES CONFERENCE:
By Bruce Gagnon, Feb. 18, 2009, Space4Peace(Organizing Notes)

* More than 100 years after the colonial Spanish-American war, the U.S. has military bases in Guam, the Philippines, Cuba and Puerto Rico. More than 60 years after the end of WWII and 50 after the end of the Korean War, we have 124 base sites in Germany, 124 in Japan, and 87 in South Korea. Even as we recognize the central importance of diplomacy, new bases are being acquired in Latin America, Central Europe and Central Asia.

* Overseas bases are too expensive, especially in a time of economic crisis.
- Costs are estimated at around $140 billion per year.
- Unlike domestic bases, overseas bases suck taxpayer money away from the US.
- They suck money away from critical needs at home and abroad.
- Much of the spending enriches private base contractors like corruption-plagued KBR.

* Our overseas basing structure is damaging our national security not making us safer.
- As in Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Iraq, and Afghanistan, overseas bases become lighting rods for attacks on the US, encouraging resentment, radicalism, and anti-Americanism. Even in countries like Japan and Germany, their negative impacts on “host communities” have resulted in suffering, resentments and protests.
- Overseas bases often harm the nation’s reputation, engender grievances and anger, and create antagonistic rather than cooperative relationships with other nations.

* Overseas bases do not stabilize dangerous regions of the world. They destabilize them.
- They encourage skyrocketing levels of militarization.

- They enlarge the security threat to other nations who respond by boosting military spending.

* Overseas bases increase the likelihood of war
- They encourage our leaders to opt for military rather than diplomatic resolution of conflicts by making it easier and thus more likely to resort to deadly, catastrophic wars, like the war in Iraq, or military interventions in countries like Nicaragua or Somalia.

* Overseas bases inflict terrible costs on local communities and nations.
- Some of the costs include environmental damage, health hazards, social and cultural disruption, increased violence against women, crime, and prostitution.

* Overseas bases inflict painful costs on military families, separating personnel from loved ones and disrupting family life with frequent deployment shifts around the globe.

* Overseas bases lead us to support dictators and repressive, undemocratic regimes.
- Examples include Uzbekistan, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia.

* Congress should hold hearings to examine the overseas basing structure, including its constitutional responsibility to approve SOFAs which are, functionally, treaties.

* We must begin to close our overseas bases to help ensure our and others security. Closing military bases also necessitates cleaning up and removing military toxics so that these sites can safely be put to other uses.

These are the issues that will be featured at the upcoming Security Without Empire: National Organizing Conference on Foreign Military Bases that will be held at American University in Washington DC on February 27-March 2. A protest vigil at the Pentagon will kick off the weekend beginning at 4:00 pm on February 27.

For registration information see the conference web site at: www.projectonmilitarybases.org

posted by Bruce Gagnon |

* Related blog*

http://space4peace.blogspot.com/2009/03/full-dc-trip-report.html

Text FW: NO U.S. BASES CONFERENCE COMING UP

From the Blog of Organizing Notes(Space4Peace) by Bruce Gagnon
Saturday, February 07, 2009
NO U.S. BASES CONFERENCE COMING UP


An event called Security Without Empire: National Organizing Conference on Foreign Military Bases will be held at American University in Washington D.C. on Feb. 27–Mar. 2, 2009.

There is a sense of relief that many here in the U.S. feel after the presidential election, but we understand this is a time to step up our organizing for peace and economic justice - including the growing movement to close and withdraw the nearly 1,000 U.S. military bases located in foreign nations.

From Okinawa and Guam to Honduras, Germany, Iraq, and beyond people who have suffered from the abuses inherent to foreign military bases have been calling for their withdrawal. People in the U.S. have joined this call, outraged by the damage done by U.S. bases abroad and by their expense, which diverts $138 billion a year from addressing human needs and revitalizing our economy.

A broad coalition of groups from across the U.S. is organizing the conference including the Global Network, Veterans for Peace, FOR, CodePink, AFSC, United for Peace & Justice and Peace Action. Bruce Gagnon and GN affiliate Tim Rinne (Nebraskans for Peace) will be doing a workshop on space issues at the conference.

The conference will feature base opponents from many “host” nations and will include leading activists as keynote speakers, panelists and workshop facilitators. Monday, March 2, will be a lobbying day on Capitol Hill, in which we encourage as many conference attendees as possible to participate. The conference will begin with a protest vigil at the Pentagon on Feb 27 from 4-5 pm at the Pentagon Metro stop (take yellow or blue Metro line to get there).

For more information contact: GGold@afsc.org or (617) 661-6130. http://www.projectonmilitarybases.org/