Activism

By Carol Wolman

Tourists always crowd the little seaside town of Mendocino, California, on Fourth of July weekend. I made lots of copies of the attached letter to Congressman John Conyers (D-MI), which encourages him to investigate possible grounds for impeachment, and sallied forth to collect signatures.

It's the easiest canvassing I've ever done. People stood in line to sign. About half the people who signed (around 100, in a couple of hours) also took a blank copy so they could canvass their friends.

By Committee to Withdraw U.S. Troops from Iraq

Support Our Troops — But Not the Way President Bush Suggests!

Rally July 4 from Noon to 2 pm at Taft Memorial Park, at Constitution Ave. and 1st Street, N.W., Washington, D.C. (across Constitution Ave. from the Senate side of the Capitol).

To Oppose the War in Iraq and Press for a Firm Timetable to Bring Our Troops Home

Join neighbors and friends to hear speeches and music on Capitol Hill at noon on the Fourth to protest the war and demand that Congress set a firm schedule to bring U.S. troops home. Metro: Union Station, Judiciary Square and Federal Center. (NOTE: There is no march, just a rally in one location.)

Print, copy, and distribute the PDF of This Page.

Link to talking points on impeachment

Link to talking points on London bombings

The Downing Street Minutes and related documents (all available at http://www.afterdowningstreet.org ) provide new and compelling evidence that President Bush, by the summer of 2002:

FOIA from Congress, Questions from Media, Poll from Public

There's progress on every front:

Fifty-two Congress Members have filed a Freedom of Information Act request to the White House, the Department of Defense, and the Department of State seeking any and all documents and materials concerning the Downing Street Minutes and the lead up to the Iraq war.
http://www.afterdowningstreet.org/?q=node/597

Prime Minister Tony Blair has confirmed the authenticity of the Downing Street Minutes.
http://www.afterdowningstreet.org/?q=node/590

A Zogby poll has found that 42 percent of Americans would favor impeachment proceedings if President Bush misled the nation about his reasons for going to war with Iraq. Imagine where that figure will be after the public learns about the Downing Street Minutes!

CODEPINK calls on Gov. Schwarzenegger to Bring the Guard Home from Iraq and Stop them from Spying on Peace Groups

SAN FRANCISCO - June 30 - According to emails obtained by the San Jose Mercury News, the California National Guard has created a new unit designed to deal with terrorist threats.

One of the first projects of the new guard unit was to spy on women's peace groups that held a small Mother's Day rally in Sacramento calling for CA Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger to bring the state's national guard troops home from Iraq.''We want the national guard troops to come home from Iraq, but not for this," said Natalie Wormeli of CODEPINK's Davis, California chapter. They should be fighting wildfires and doing the sort of work they were trained for.''

Resources for events.

You can create a public listing of your event here. You will be able to communicate with the people who sign up for your event, and to edit the listing for your event, changing or filling in details later, which means that you can signup to host an event, but indicate that some details are "To Be Announced." Again the instructions for editing your event are here.

By Democrats.com

According to a poll released by Zogby today, 42% of Americans say they would favor impeachment proceedings if President Bush misled the nation about his reasons for going to war with Iraq.

"The results of this Zogby poll are astonishing and reveal the depth of anger among the American people over President Bush's lies about Iraq, even among 25% of Republicans" said Bob Fertik, president of Democrats.com.

"These results are especially remarkable because few Americans are even aware of the secret Downing Street Memos, which prove that President Bush was determined to invade Iraq long before he consulted Congress or the United Nations in the fall of 2002," Fertik said. "These official minutes of Prime Minister Blair's national security council meeting prove 'the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy' - that Bush knowingly lied to the world to sell his war plans."

Veterans For Peace
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Veterans GROUP ISSUES "DECLARATION OF IMPEACHMENT" AND ANNOUNCES PETITION TO REMOVE pRESIDENT bUSH

St. Louis – A national veterans’ organization today issued a “Declaration of Impeachment

Consortiumnews.com
By Robert Parry

In the days ahead, American politicians and pundits will talk a lot about “leveling

Military Families Speak out
http://www.mfso.org/

Joyce and Kevin Lucey are members of Military Families Speak Out and Gold Star Families for Peace. Their son, Cpl. Jeffrey Lucey, served in the Marine Reserves in Iraq in 2003. He came home neither safe nor sound. He suffered from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, and took his own life on June 22, 2004. His name is not in the Department of Defenses' roster of those who died in this war; yet Cpl. Lucey is a casualty of this war as much as any who has lost his or her life on the battlefield. This is their thoughts after watching President speak at Fort Bragg on June 28, 2005.

The Chattanoogan

With all due respect to Colonel Moon and the 25,000 or so American families who awaken every day trying to convince themselves that their loved ones' sacrifices have been, in George Bush's words, "worth it," I must say I am one American who came perilously close to throwing a shoe through the TV screen last night. Word up, Mr. Bush, we can handle the truth - some of us knew it from the start. So quit lying and obfuscating and preying upon our instinctive patriotism while our nation's sons and daughters are killed and maimed trying to fight the illegal, immoral war which you and your axis of evangelical, neo-conservative sycophants have hung around our nation's neck like an albatross. You, in my opinion, are years past the time when you should have been impeached, put before an international war crimes tribunal, and put in prison.

There is Something in the Air, But It is Not on the Airwaves
By Chris Chandler and Anne Feeney arranged by David Roe

You know, we have GOT it together. There ARE people in the streets.
At the very onset of Oil War Two there were already more people on the
streets protesting than there were at the height of the Vietnam war.
There is something in the air, but it is not on the airwaves.

If there are a half a dozen Jaycees in Cincinnati on a street corner
waving yellow ribbons, Fox news acts like it's A Republican Woodstock.
"By the time we got to Fallujah we were half a million strong."

BY TOMIO GERON
THE OLYMPIAN, WA

While President Bush made his case Tuesday for the war in Iraq, a small group of local veterans called for his impeachment for taking the country into war in the first place.

About a dozen members of the local chapter of Veterans for Peace delivered a letter to the Olympia office of U.S. Rep. Brian Baird, D-Vancouver, calling on him to support an inquiry into impeachment of the president.

The veterans filed into Baird's waiting room and spoke to the congressman's representative, who accepted their statements.

"I want the war to end. I want our soldiers to come home," said Jody Tiller of Olympia, who served six years in Korea with the Air Force. "I want our soldiers home safe and well. Our soldiers were betrayed into going over there."

Raleigh News and Observer
By MATTHEW EISLEY, Staff Writer

FAYETTEVILLE -- As President Bush renewed his case for war among hundreds of soldiers at Fort Bragg, a detachment of about 50 war protesters in Fayetteville urged a turn toward peace.
"I love my country," said Hillary Fisher, 34, the owner of the Modern Times clothing store in Chapel Hill and a first-time war protester.

"I can't believe what's happening, so I was compelled to come out," she said. "President Bush owes us answers. And he owes us an end date. The fact that there's no end date concerns me."

Fisher and others at the peace vigil at Fayetteville's antebellum Market House, a central landmark in this military city, read aloud the names of the more than 1,700 U.S. troops killed so far in Iraq.

by Sam Husseini

Sectors of the peace movement in the U.S. -- at least those which still
show signs of having a pulse -- have seized upon the Downing Street Memo
which might finally draw out in some substantive fashion the deceitful
manner in which the U.S. moved toward the invasion of Iraq. The group
AfterDowningStreet.org has called for an inquiry into possible impeachable
offenses committed by Bush.

Meanwhile other people in the U.S. who continue to back Bush are focusing
on "how to end the insurgency." They talk of the U.S. military casualties
in Iraq and see that Donald Rumsfeld now states that the insurgency could

DSM Town Hall Meetings to be Held Nationwide on July 23rd
By Congressman John Conyers

I am pleased to announce that on Saturday, July 23rd, a number of Congressional Members and I will be holding town hall meetings to discuss the Downing Street Minutes and related developments in the Iraq War directly with our constituents. We chose July 23rd because it is the third anniversary of the now infamous Downing Street meeting in London.

This is part of the follow up to our hugely successful hearing we held in the basement of the Capitol Building on June 16, at which we obtained sworn testimony on the Downing Street Minutes and pre-war intelligence manipulation. On that date we also delivered to the White House a letter demanding answers from President Bush signed by more than 560,000 Americans and 128 Members of Congress. Educating the public and allowing the American people to be heard on this seminal issue is an important and necessary next step in our campaign to restore trust in our democracy.

ZNet | Iraq
by Phyllis Bennis; Institute for Policy Studies; June 28, 2005

Anti-war organizing that began within days of September 11th and kicked into high gear in the run-up to Bush's war in Iraq is paying off. In the last two or three weeks, sparked by the Downing Street Memo, but grounded in years of careful and intensive local and national organizing (along with growing official recognition that military "victory" in Iraq is impossible), we have seen a major tipping point in anti-war sentiment in public opinion, and resulting shifts in congress. The most significant aspect is that a large majority of people in this country now believe some or all U.S. troops should be withdrawn from Iraq. New polls put that figure at 60%. The uncertainty within the peace movement about calling for U.S. troops to be brought home has faded, and there is greater clarity than ever on the demand. After UFPJ was able to mobilize 3300 messages to congress in less than 24 hours, an unexpected 128 members supported the Woolsey amendment calling for a troop withdrawal plan and amendment; soon after, almost 50 members of Congress joined the new "Out of Iraq Caucus," which will escalate the anti-war challenge inside the Democratic party. Even Republican opposition is growing, with Walter "Freedom Fries" Jones and Ron Paul joining Bill Abercrombie and Dennis Kucinich to introduce a bill calling on Bush to announce a plan for a withdrawal from Iraq that would begin by October 1, 2006.

Public pressure has reversed the Post's public position, moving this story from one the paper would not cover (and declared in an editorial was not news) to one that's on the front page. But it's just a start, and citizens in DC are still taking action:

When: Weds. June 29, 5Pm til...

Where: Wash Post 15th and L

Who: NoVA peace, DAWN, Gold Star Family members, assorted other activist
groups

Why: Read below... (note that Wash Post on 6-28 DID finally give it a
front page news story, but we want more *news* coverage and no more Dana
Milbank smear peices)

Why Isn’t the Washington Post Fully Covering This Story?

IRAQ WAR VETERANS, MILITARY FAMILIES, OTHERS PROTEST BUSH APPEARANCE AT FT. BRAGG and SAY: SUPPORT OUR TROOPS – BRING THEM HOME NOW; AND TAKE CARE OF THEM WHEN THEY GET HERE!

FAYETTEVILLE, NC – On Tuesday, June 28th, President Bush will be appearing at Ft. Bragg in Fayetteville, North Carolina, to try to resuscitate the flagging support for the war in Iraq. Iraq War Veterans, military families, veterans of previous wars, and others who oppose the war in Iraq will be in Fayetteville to protest President Bush’s captive-audience photo opportunity and challenge the false picture of the war being portrayed by the White House. The Bush visit comes in the wake of a local (Fayetteville) newspaper poll showing that over forty percent of local residents are not in favor of the war, while national polls show that 52% of the US population want troops withdrawn and 60% believe the war in Iraq is not worth fighting....

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PDF VERSION

Congress [...]
1234 Any Street
Anytown, ST, 12345

Dear Congress [...]

I am writing to respectfully request that you consider co-sponsoring a Resolution of Inquiry regarding the conduct of President George W. Bush, Vice-President Richard B. Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld, and other designated officials, for specifically making false statements in the execution of their official duties. This Administration has manipulated the media and concealed information vital to public discourse in a democracy.

Therefore I urge you to do what is right and co-sponsor the Resolution of Inquiry.

How to Lobby Training Kit

Order this Lobby Kit as a book!

Table of Contents

Introduction
Lobbying Overview
How to Lobby the Public
Responding to Constituents' Concerns
Know Your Rights

How To Conduct A Letter-Writing Campaign PDF

A Supplement to AfterDowningStreet.org "How to Lobby Kit"

1. What to have on hand:

blank white computer paper

clipboards, pens

"sample letter to the congressperson" (from HOW TO LOBBY KIT, on AfterDowningStreet.org website) HAVE APPROX. 10 OR SO COPIES

a blown-up, laminated "letter to the congressperson", for use to attract public attention

flyers, with someone's email address on them for tracking (optional)

Sample PSA

The Iraq war has become less and less popular, and Congress has the power to end it. Come out and talk about whether that should be done and how to make it happen. Speakers at a Town Hall Forum here in ______ on Saturday, January 7th, will include _______________. This event will take place from _____ to _________ at _____________. For more information, see After Downing Street Dot org.

CALENDAR ANNOUNCEMENT:

Public Forum on Ending the War

WHAT: An Out of Iraq Town Hall Forum
[DESCRIBE WHAT WILL OCCUR, LIST NOTABLE PARTICIPANTS]

WHEN: [List start time and ending time], Jan. 7, 2006.

WHERE: [Give location, address.]

MORE INFORMATION:
[Organization Name]
[CONTACT INFO]
http://www.afterdowningstreet.org

[INCLUDE DETAILED LOCAL CONTACT INFO, EVEN IF NOT ALL FOR PUBLICATION]