media

We were so pleased to find FOR featured in this month's Yes! magazine in a feature about "DIY Foreign Policy Heroes."

Yes! published a photo (without credit) of members of our December Iran delegation, but did give us credit for being "Citizen Ambassadors" in this short piece:

When I was in Bogota earlier this month continuing research on US military aid, I caught up with Mike Power, a stringer for BBC and Reuters. He had just come back from the Meta region, where he’d interviewed the mother of a 15-year-old boy killed by the army and passed off as a guerrilla. He talked about how he’d stayed up late transcribing the interview, hearing the woman say over and over on his machine “I came home and I was destroyed.” We spoke of the experience of translating and interpreting, how powerful it is when the personal voice of another, someone in grief, comes through you.

The BBC didn’t run his piece, apparently because the mother’s testimony was not sufficiently ‘credible.’ Fortunately, online magaine The First Post has featured this story, and quotes FOR and Amnesty International (see article below). FOR and Amnesty collaborated on a joint report about US support for Colombian army units that have committed extrajudicial killings. You can see it at www.forcolombia.org/Calltoinvestigate

It is 5 p.m. in Iran, 8 and 1/2 hours east of New York, and I am sending a first brief report from our civilian diplomacy delegation. It has been an exhausting and invigorating two days, only a few hours of which have actually been spent here in the country.

Congrats to Rick Zand whose article about Iran was just published in the Barre Montepelier (VT) Times-Argus. One of the most importaning things our peace delegates do after visiting countries in conflict is to share the experience and the word of peace with their own communities.

Last week in the printed version of Colombia’s second largest national newspaper El Espectador, an article was printed in the “People of the Year” section that applauded Colombia's Defense Minister for his counter-terrorism accomplishments, and went on to accuse the many organizations that do human rights work in Colombia of being manipulated by the FARC!

Read on to learn more about this dangerous and misleading statement, and read FOR's response which was signed by over twenty organizations.

From Buddhist Peace Fellowship board member Jesse Maceo Vega-Frey:

If you haven't heard much about Burma in the news during the past few days, its because the Burmese military junta has successfully managed to cut most lines of popular communication with the outside world. This has enabled the regime to crack down on democracy activists under a veil of near darkness. Reports of horrendous violence on lay people and on the monastic community have confirmed the fears of the continued willingness of the regime to degrade, brutalize and murder their own citizens.

Making sure that the world can witness what is going on within Burma is one of the only means we have of keeping the activities of the government under check and bring power back into the hands of the Burmese people. There is a dire need to get video equipment and transmission equipment back into the country and into the hands of democracy activists so that the world can once again bring its attention to the needs of the people of Burma.

"Kentucky at War," proclaims this week's issue of The Nation, the standard-bearer of the U.S. socialist-bending progressive community. The Nation has been publishing a series of articles looking at the political debates in so-called "red" states as the presidential campaign heats up.

Here's a bit from a good essay on AlterNet.org about how September 11th is misused by the media and misunderstood by the American people:

What happened on Sept. 11, 2001, was extraordinary and horrible by any measure. And certainly a crime against humanity. At the same time, it was a grisly addition to a history of human experience that has often included many thousands killed, en masse, by inhuman human choice.

This Thursday, June 28th, several national staff from the Fellowship of Reconciliation will facilitate a workshop on the topic of grassroots civilian diplomacy at the U.S. Social Forum. Join us from 1:00 to 3:00 p.m. at St. Lukes Episcopal Church in downtown Atlanta to learn more about our work to end militarism in the United States, Latin America, and the Middle East.