Washington, D.C.–Tomorrow, Americans will march on the White House in protest of the ongoing war occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq. Demonstrators Thursday called Bush and Obama’s wars an “illegal war for empire.”
The ANSWER coalition (Act Now to Stop War and End Racism) has been fined $7,500 for putting up signs in a move by the government that Brian Becker of the ANSWER Coalition said is “trying to limit or eviscerate or criminalize grassroots organizing itself.”
They were fined for handing out leaflets and putting up posters and signs, which the Department of Public Works has demanded the organization’s members remove.
Becker said that for eighteen months they have been targeted, accumulating between seventy and eighty thousand dollars in fines.
President of Veterans for Peace Mike Ferner said, “We will not be leaving Iraq and Afghanistan unless enough people in this country stand up.”
Organizers say the Afghanistan conflict is “Obama’s War,” just as Iraq was Bush’s war, and there is no difference between the two Presidents’ war policies.
Becker said a growing number of people oppose “the expanding war in Afghanistan, the continued occupation Afghanistan, [and] the continued occupation of Iraq.”
Cindy Sheehan, who garnered public attention in 2005 for camping outside President Bush’s ranch in Crawford, Tex. said, “Some people have abandoned the antiwar movement, have abandoned peace, since Obama’s been president. But we need to re-create a movement.”
Pondolfino of Military Families Speak Out said Thursday, “I’m the proud mother of an active-duty infantry soldier…We love and support our troops. And it is because we do that we will vocally show our opposition whenever our government sends them to ill-advised, immoral, unwinnable wars.”
Tyler Bass will report in to The Elf Wax Times via cell-phone, sending large photographs of the demonstration as it unfolds throughout the day, starting in LaFayette park across the street from the White House, and throughout the march on Washington in which tens of thousands of people are expected to participate.