It's Starting To Get Personal.

Some military men are coming around to an anti-Iraq War perspective, while some not in the military but like to pretend they are are hoping to bring the fight into the streets of America.

From gulfnews.com

'In an interview with The Sunday Telegraph, Major General John Batiste, who resigned last year after 12 months stationed in Iraq's Sunni Triangle, said the Pentagon chief [Rumsfeld] had caused "unnecessary deaths" by committing "strategic blunders of enormous magnitude".'

From poughkeepsiejournal:

(Per protest at West Point graduation)
Wearing sergeant chevrons and shouldering a large American flag, Jason Peterson of Albany said he believes Bush intentionally lied about the reasons for the war, betraying service members who signed up to defend their country. ‘‘That sort of thing is not what people should be sacrificing their lives for,’’ said Peterson, a former Marine who served in the first Gulf War.
And Peterson expressed concern for soldiers and Marines returning from combat not only with physical injuries, but the psychological trauma associated with deployment to a war zone: ‘‘You can’t just switch it off.’’

We need some of these brave and gallant officers to come to Tucson to protect our protestors from the Freeper Goon Squads whose behavior here is getting more and more and more threatening and aggressive with each passing day. Today I went down to the main recruiting office on Speedway to participate in the weekly peace demonstration (okay, anti-war), and, as has been the case since last summer, the counter protestors were there with their huge flags, and their expensive professionally printed banners, foul mouths, personal insults and generally reprehensible behavior. They purport to be patriotic Americans who are just "counter-protesting" but interaction with them has proven that this is not the case. Whenever there is not a police presence these purportedly patriotic individuals that I choose to call "pidiots" (cause they sure as hell aren't patriots) surround peace protesters, step on toes, push and bully them. Today individual thugs threatened women protestors by saying that the peace protestors' time "was comin'" and that he and others (the militia type thugs) were going to clean up the border and rid it of traitors on both sides of the border. They have been escalating their aggression and rather suspiciously police have chosen to stay away. These pidiot bullies jab the sharp metal ends of their 10 ft. flag poles within a couple inches of the faces of elderly women. They get within inches of protestors and come from "their side" of the street to stand literally over them (these thugs are much larger than the women and elderly men protestors) and cover the peace signs and placards with their flags. This morning at least one of the "pidiots" was using such lewd and liscientious sexually explicit language and graphic insults and threats that it was nauseating and frightening to those who could hear.

We need calm matriotically inclined people to join with us to document these attrocious threats.

The police will do nothing. They have chosen to advise the peace protestors that until someone is hurt, that they can do nothing. They are clearly buddies of the recruiters and the lines between police and military are very blurry here near the border. Remember this is the same police department that ordered the Raging Grannies onto private property so they could arrest them.

The zeitgesit here in Tucson is weird to say the least. We are in the heart of the battle zone that is being created by the campaign to create an "other" from the migrant laborers so that the uniformed and easily influenced people of the US have someone to label as "enemy." Activism here has been such a staple in the community for so long that people who might be out in the streets if they lived in other places think that others here in Tucson are "already taking care of it."

The disturbing things about these "Freepers" is that they attack individuals, have come to people's homes, gang up on individuals, take encouragement from the neo-nazi element of the vigilante groups on the border and are bouyed up by the fervor of Memorial Day weekend, and the knowledge that the Tucson Police will be conveniently absent on Wednesday mornings although they were there almost every Wednesday before the Freepers started showing up. These for the most part are powerless males (mainly white) who feel that the power they were raised to believe they would have as adult white men in America has been unjustly denied them. These are the folks who grasp at and gobble up the rhetoric of the rulers of the government, media, and such. They believe they have a right (possibly grant by the Divine) to power, and will attempt to assert dominance over anyone they see as weaker than themselves or who just happen to be in vulnerable or physically isolated at the moment. These folks are potentially very, very dangerous.

Remember Greensboro, NC -- Nov 3. 1979? If not you should look it up. Start here. Or just read this excerpt:

Police - who had left the demonstration at 10:30 a.m. to take a "lunch break" - arrived only after the shooting had stopped, even though an informant for the Greensboro Police Department and a federal agent were with the Klansmen and knew their plans.

One of the first things police did after their arrival was to arrest demonstrators - including Willena Cannon, who tried to stop their frenzied attack on Nelson Johnson, a fellow organizer, who had been stabbed in the shoulder by a Klansman. "I knew if I didn't do they'd kill him," she said. She was arrested and charged with interfering with arrest; then she was taken to jail and interrogated. "They'had me in this little room," she said. "I didn't know where my children were. My body literally shut down."

When did this happen? Not in the 1940s, '50s or '60s, but in 1979. Emily Mann's new play, "Greensboro: A Requiem," now playing at McCarter Theatre tells the story of that day, Nov. 3, 1979, and the events leading up to it.

Klansmen and American Nazis shot 13 people that day - several of them right between the eyes. Five died. Others - including Paul Bermanzohn, who was paralyzed - were permanently injured.

Even though the video coverage showed the murders clearly, an allwhite jury acquitted the Klansmen and Nazis of all charges. A civil trial eventually determined collusion between the Klan and Greensboro police in the slayings and ordered the City of Greensboro to pay damages to the widows and children of the victims.

But no Klansman ever paid a penny in damages. Nor did any Klansman ever spend a day in prison for the murders - not even Dave Matthews, who admitted to police that he thought he had shot three people. "There were some innocent people shot, I reckon," he said. "But I was shooting at the niggers."

Any ideas how to disarm these pidiots?