Code Pink formally aligns themselves with Jihad and Terrorism

When CODEPINK launched our hunger strike, called Troops Home Fast on July 4, our goal was to push forward a peace process in Iraq that included the withdrawal of US troops. Our efforts were rewarded when Iraqi Parliamentarians, expressing sympathy for the hunger strikers, invited us to Amman, Jordan, to break our 30-day fast and discuss how we could work together to promote a comprehensive Reconciliation Plan.

On Wednesday, August 2, a 14-person delegation, including "peace mom" Cindy Sheehan, former Colonel Ann Wright, Iraq war veteran Geoffrey Millard, writer/politician Tom Hayden, Iraqi analyst Raed Jarrar and CODEPINK co-founders Medea Benjamin, Jodie Evans, Gael Murphy and Diane Wilson, traveled to Jordan to meet with official representatives of the largest Shiite coalition, the minority Sunni bloc, the secular parliamentary coalition, the Muslim Scholars Association and torture victims from Abu Ghraib. The Iraqis were delighted to find Americans who, like them, were passionate about ending the occupation and the violence that has wracked their country. "We have found a voice inside the U.S. that backs us," Salman al-Jumaili, speaker of the largest Sunni Parliamentary coalition, told reporters at our closing press conference (click here for AP story)

The common thread among this diverse group of Iraqis and Americans was a desire to set a timetable for the withdrawal of US troops, ensure no permanent bases in Iraq, and secure a U.S. commitment to pay for rebuilding Iraq. Other issues that emerged in two-days of intensive talks include the need to dismantle militias, provide amnesty for prisoners and the various armed groups, compensate victims of the violence, revise the Constitution and preserve the unity of Iraq, and reverse US-imposed de-Baathification and economic policies. We left this historic meeting with a commitment to make sure that the voices of these Iraqi parliamentarians are heard here in the US, and we will bring a group of them to the U.S. in the Fall.

On the heels of these meetings in Jordan, a part of our delegation traveled on to Lebanon while the fighting was still raging. After a harrowing ride from Syria over freshly bombed roads and bridges, we were greeted in Beirut to the booms of Israeli bombardments. We visited the devastated neighborhoods of Southern Beirut. We provided aid to traumatized children in improvised refugee camps. We heard from angry Lebanese residents who condemned the Bush administration for providing Israel with the green light -- and the weapons -- to kill over 1,000 civilians and destroy their airport, ports, bridges, roads, factories, and worst of all, entire towns and residential neighborhoods.

Now that there is a ceasefire, hundreds of thousands of displaced Lebanese need help returning home. While our government has given Israel billions for bombs and guns that have killed and maimed over 1,000 Lebanese, it has pledged a mere $50 million for rebuilding. We -- US Citizens -- should push our government to provide more funds. Now more than ever we should show the Lebanese people that we care about peace not only by continuing to oppose our military policies in the Middle East but also by supporting and joining their peace efforts. With your help we can send delegations of US women peace activists to Lebanon, we can help fund a peace walk to the Lebanese-Israeli border and we can support efforts to clear unexploded cluster bombs in southern Lebanon. We have made wonderful new friends among the Lebanese peace groups. Let's show them we want peace as badly as they do (click here to donate now).

If we in the US show the same compassion for all victims -- be they Israelis, Iraqis or Lebanese -- and put our efforts into negotiations instead of war, we would have a greater chance of ending the violence that is consuming the Middle East as well as the blowback that threatens the security of Americans.

Allison, Anedra, Dana, Erin, Farida, Gael, Jodie, Katie, Laura, Medea, Meredith, Nancy, Rae, Samantha and Tiffany

I hope the FBI looks at this group...

http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=1056

Tom Hayden, L.A., and Me
By David Horowitz

Tom Hayden and I were once comrades-in-arms in a movement to overthrow America's democratic institutions, remake its government in a Marxist image and help America's enemies defeat her sons on the field of battle. Now he is running for mayor of Los Angeles and many people are asking me, "Does this past matter?" I think it does.

Hayden and I were deadly serious about our revolutionary agendas. During the Vietnam War, Tom traveled many times to North Vietnam, Czechoslovakia and Paris to meet communist North Vietnamese and Viet Cong leaders. He came back from Hanoi proclaiming he had seen "rice roots democracy at work." According to people who were present at the time, including Sol Stern, later an aide to Manhattan Borough President Andrew Stein, Hayden offered tips on conducting psychological warfare against the U.S. He arranged trips to Hanoi for Americans perceived as friendly to the Communists and blocked entry to those seen as unfriendly, like the sociologist Christopher Jencks. He attacked as "propaganda" stories of torture and labeled American POWs returning home with such stories as "liars." Even after America withdrew its troops from Indochina, Hayden lobbied Congress to end all aid to the anti-Communist regimes in Vietnam and Cambodia. When the cutoff came, the regimes fell and the Communists conquered South Vietnam and Cambodia and slaughtered 2.5 million people. When anti-war activist Joan Baez protested the human rights violations of the North Vietnamese victors, Hayden called her a tool of the CIA.

On the domestic front, Hayden advocated urban rebellions and called for the creation of "guerrilla focos" to resist police and other law enforcement agencies. For a while he led a Berkeley commune called the "Red Family," whose "Minister of Defense" trained commune members at firing ranges and instructed high school students in the use of explosives. He was also an outspoken supporter of the violence-prone Black Panther Party.

Why do these facts still seem important? It is not that I think a man cannot learn from his mistakes, or change his mind. Far from it. I myself have recently published a memoir recounting my own activities in the radical Left, a past that I now regret. I find this history relevant not just because Hayden is now proposing himself as the chief executive of one of America's most important cities, but because he has never been fully candid about this past. He has not owned up to the extent of his dealings with America's former enemies or to the true agenda of the Red Family commune, which was little more than a left-wing militia. He has remained silent about the criminal activities which included murder of the Black Panther Party, whose cause he promoted at the time.

To be fair, Hayden has admitted to some second thoughts. In an abstract way, he now understands that the democratic process is better than the totalitarian one. He now claims to embrace more modest ambitions about what can be accomplished in the political arena. Yet, in all these years, he has not found the courage to be candid about what he actually did.

His silence on these matters has been coupled of late with an ongoing attack on the FBI, the CIA and other authorities responsible for the public's security and safety. In his 450-page memoir, published only a few years ago, Hayden included many pages of his FBI dossier, along with his sarcastic comments suggesting that the agents who kept an eye on him were no different from the agents of a police state trying to suppress unpopular ideas. Just last week Hayden, along with American communist Angela Davis and other '60s leftovers, led a march on Los Angeles City Hall organized by something calling itself the "Crack the CIA Coalition." Among its demands were "Dismantle the CIA" and "Stop the media cover-up of CIA drug involvement," a reference to a San Jose Mercury News story discredited by the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times and the Washington Post that claimed the CIA had flooded Los Angeles' inner-city communities with crack cocaine.

This sowing of suspicion of legal authority is troubling in a man who proposes himself as the leader of a city like Los Angeles, which has many political, racial and economic fault lines, and in which there are visible tensions between its diverse communities. At worst, it fuels the racial paranoia of elements in the inner-city community who are convinced that there is a government plot to eliminate their leaders, not to mention their community itself.

It is only five years since a mob in South Central, inspired by this deep suspicion and distrust of public authority, went on a rampage that killed 58 people, burned 2,000 businesses and destroyed a large section of the city. Its citizens cannot afford to have as their chief public official a man who inspires such distrust, and who actively sows suspicion about the institutions of civil law and authority. We cannot afford "the fire next time."

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