Action Alerts

From National Religious Campaign Against Torture:

TORTURE IS A MORAL ISSUE

Dear NRCAT Supporters:

We now have strong evidence that, as many of us have suspected, the abuses perpetrated on detainees over the past 7 years were not simply the acts of "rogue" agents or low ranking soldiers, but were instead planned and approved of by top Administration officials - including the President himself, as well as Vice-President Dick Cheney. ABC News and the Associated Press recently reported that the President's top national security advisors met in the White House, on numerous occasions and with the President's approval, to authorize interrogators to torture high-value detainees (by waterboarding them and subjecting them to sleep deprivation, among other abuses). Unfortunately, these dramatic revelations have been largely ignored by the media and the public.

Please help inform the public about the fact that top Administration officials were directly involved in planning the torture of high-value detainees by writing a letter to the editor of your local newspaper expressing your deep concern about learning that your leaders participated in the torture planning meetings and your disappointment that the media and the public have not responded to the news about the meetings with the appropriate vigor and outrage.

I caught most of the debate last night.  As Obama said early in the campaign...this is when it gets to be "silly season" in politics.  As Obama said last night, the Clintons have learned the wrong message from the Republican attack machine and what the media chooses to focus upon.  They decide to become of it and perpetuate the worst aspects of attack politics, rather than attempting to rise above it.   Below is the action alert from moveon: 

If you missed the Democratic presidential debate on ABC last night, Editor & Publisher called it "perhaps the most embarrassing performance by the media in a major presidential debate in years."1 (Click below to see video excerpts.)

Moderators George Stephanopoulos and Charlie Gibson spent the first 50 minutes obsessed with distractions that only political insiders care about—verbal gaffes, polling numbers, the stale Rev. Wright story, and the old-news Bosnia story. And, channeling Karl Rove, they directed a video question to Barack Obama asking if he loves the American flag or not. Seriously.

Shocking headlines from the past week have left me deeply concerned. The world is in a hunger crisis. In just three years, the price of staple foods like wheat, corn and rice has almost doubled. If we don't do something soon, hundreds of thousands of people face starvation and a hundred million more could fall into extreme poverty. UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon said, "The rapidly escalating crisis of food availability around the world has reached emergency proportions."

Violent protests have already taken down the government in Haiti. Similar expressions of frustration and fear have broken out in a dozen countries from Cameroon to Uzbekistan, with experts warning that 33 countries are at risk of social upheaval because of rising food prices.

The question is what can we do now?

This summer, the leaders of the eight wealthiest nations (known as the Group of Eight or G8) will gather in Japan to set a global policy agenda. That agenda must include emergency action against hunger and long-term commitments to tackle the causes of this crisis.

Click the link below to send the following petition to President Bush asking him to rally the G8 to end the hunger crisis as part of an aggressive anti-poverty agenda:

http://www.one.org/hungercrisis/

President Bush,

Just when you think it can't get any worse, the Bush Administration finds a new way to shock the conscience. Yesterday, ABC News reported that Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice chaired explicit White House discussions about which torture techniques should be used on prisoners.

They "were so detailed" that "some of the interrogation sessions were almost choreographed -- down to the number of times CIA agents could use a specific tactic."1 This is the first time that we have evidence that senior officials, "not only discussed specific plans and specific interrogation methods, but approved them". Given these new revelations, Condoleezza Rice can not continue as Secretary of State.

Sign our Petition demanding that Rice resign:    http://www.truemajority.org/condi

The Episcopal Public Policy Network
Policy Alert

In an April 2 syndicated column titled "Obama's Dimestore 'Mein Kampf,' "