Over the summer and fall of 2011, I drove across the country from southern California to New York City. I made the trip with filmmaker MJ Sieber, playwright Mallery Avidon, and — when she could escape her job — my wife, Tasha Garcia Gibson.

We occupied blistering hot sidewalks, trying to catch people outside unemployment offices; we attended church services where congregations provided guidance for the unemployed; we stalked business reporters, distant relatives, and recognizable Facebook friends, trying to find those who were laid off in the five-year span from 2007 to 2011, those who would be willing to tell the story of the day they lost that job, the circumstances that led up to it, and the consequences that followed.

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As if the peace movement hasn’t enough on its plate already, the military-industrial complex invents a new and easier way to wage war: the unmanned drone.

For the busy activist trying to grapple with the growing development of the drone wars, what’s needed is a well-written, easy-to-read book, coming from a committed nonviolent perspective, that lays out the issues in an accessible but not simplistic way. Thankfully, long- time Us peace activist, Medea Benjamin, has written the very thing: Drone Warfare: Killing by Remote Control.

Benjamin teases apart the varying overlapping issues connected with the growing use of drones (or Unmanned Aerial vehicles as the military insists on calling them).

Individual chapters explore the birth and growth of the industry as well as their spreading use in armed conflicts from Gaza
and Afghanistan to Yemen and somalia. The legality of their use is also investigated, in particular their use for so-called ‘targeted killings’ and their impact
on civilians in Pakistan and elsewhere.

Read the full review in Peace News

Pakistani lawyer Shahzad Akbar, who represents families of civilians killed in U.S. drone strikes, was finally granted a visa to enter the U.S. this week after a long effort by the State Department to block his visit. He has just arrived in Washington, D.C., to attend the “Drone Summit: Killing and Spying by Remote Control,” organized by human rights groups to call attention to the lethal rise in the number of drone strikes under the Obama administration. Obama argues U.S. drone strikes are focused effort at people who are on a list of active terrorists and have not caused a huge number of civilian casualties. “Either President Obama is lying to the nation, or he is too naive, to believe on the reports which CIA is presenting to [him],” responds Akbar. The summit comes as the United States pursues a radical expansion of how it carries out drone strikes inside Yemen. The so-called “signature” strike policy went into effect earlier this month, allowing the U.S. to strike without knowing the identity of targets.

See the full coverage on Democracy Now!

The human cost of the US government’s clandestine drone strikes strategy, including the deaths of young children in Pakistan and Yemen, will be highlighted this weekend as campaigners attempt to challenge domestic support for the Obama administration’s controversial policy.

A conference in Washington, at which new video testimony will be shown from the relatives of victims, is the first step in a collaborative campaign to challenge Barack Obama’s claim in February that the strikes, aimed at terror suspects, were kept on a “tight leash” and had not inflicted huge civilian casualties.

The summit’s organisers – the Center for Constitutional Rights, Reprieve and the peace group Code Pin – hope it will increase awareness of how the CIA-controlled programme is operating in secret, without a clear legal framework and without any accountability to Congress.

Earlier this month, the US government announced it was expanding its controversial use of drone aircraft to kill suspected terrorists in Yemen.

Chris Woods, a journalist at the British-based Bureau of Investigative Journalism, who exposed CIA drone attacks on rescuers and funeralgoers in Pakistan, described the summit as an “extraordinary heavyweight gathering”. He said: “Washington has not seen anything like this before.”

Woods criticised the US media for not widely reporting civilian casualties of US drone strikes abroad, which he said give a “warped understanding of what is taking place.”

Read the full article in the Guardian

At Fort Meade in Maryland, a pretrial hearing is underway in the government’s case against Private Bradley Manning, the soldier who allegedly turned over hundreds of thousands of secret reports and cables to Wikileaks. This month, an important new book on the 24-year-old has been published. In The Passion of Bradley Manning: The Story of the Suspect Behind the Largest Security Breach in U.S. History, Chase Madar says that Manning deserves the Presidential medal of Freedom for opening up our secretive foreign policy to public discussion. I talked to the author this morning.

Tell us what’s happening in the case:

Chase Madar: It’s absolutely a given that Manning is going to be convicted and sentenced to at least 50 years. It’s inexorable. That said, I don’t think the case itself is one of the major injustices that’s colliding here. There’s some unfairness in the way the prosecution is taking liberties, but the real and major injustices are laws that encourage extreme secrecy and punish transparency and everything that goes long with that, like the Iraq war.

One good development– in yesterday’s pretrial hearing, the judge did require the prosecution to provide all the internal damage reports– what damage was done or really not done by these leaks. I think what you’re going to see is that even by the government’s own estimates, these disclosures did not harm national security or national interests, broadly defined.

Read the full interview on Mondoweiss

Fethiye, Turkey – When American civil rights attorney Chase Madar told me he was writing a book entitled The Passion of Bradley Manning: The Story of the Suspect Behind the Largest Security Breach in US History, I knew right away that Madar was mentally ill, abusing a range of pharmaceuticals and possibly also epileptic.

My diagnosis was confirmed with the book’s release this month. What else would compel a lawyer to suggest that there is “an injustice hardwired within the system of laws itself”?

A studious ignorance

As Madar demonstrates in The Passion, similarly scientific methods of diagnosis have been employed in the case against Manning, the 24-year-old Army intelligence analyst from Crescent, Oklahoma who is accused of transferring hundreds of thousands of documents to the whistleblowing website WikiLeaks.

As a result of the leaks, the world has learned more about topics ranging from the etiquette of US soldiers operating Apache gunships in Iraq to US State Department machinations to prevent an increase in the hourly minimum wage in Haiti, the poorest country in the western hemisphere, from 22 to 61 cents.

Read the full article in Al Jazeera

Street smarts: Can a new book on tactics used by the Occupy Wall Street movement and other activists, written with Google Docs and funded on Kickstarter, offer the corporate world important lessons about leadership and collaboration? Fast Company’s Neil Ungerleider thinks so.

Winners and losers: Contests are a great way to motivate a business team, but without boundaries that prevent favoritism, or awards that are achievable by all, they can become a hotbed of rivalry and frustration. Inc.com’s John Treace offers five tips for inter-office competitions.

Read the full article in The Wall Street Journal< /a>

An all American hero who deserves the Presidential Medal of Freedom or a traitor to his country? Amongst his fellow Americans, supporters and detractors of Bradley Manning fall squarely into either camp, whilst so called ‘liberals’ in the US wag a stern finger, revert to their one dimensional collective consciousness of ‘sage paternalism’ and reproachfully state: ‘He broke the law’.

Private First Class Bradley Manning is recognised as the source of hundreds of thousands of documents that have appeared on the Wikileaks website, including the so called ‘Afghan War Logs’, the ‘Iraq War Logs’, the ‘Guantanamo files’, the ‘State Department Cables’. He faces twenty two charges in front of a military court, including violation of the Espionage Act (1917) and aiding and abetting the enemy, an indictment that permits use of the death penalty.

New York based attorney and writer, Chase Madar tells the story of Private First Class Bradley Manning, with careful attention to those details carelessly or purposely omitted by a mostly one sided US media. Madar’s book gives a glimpse of Manning’s early years and his exceptional scholarly potential- winning prizes at science fairs and representing his school in intellectual competitions, designing his first website aged ten and enjoying the admiration of his young peers. These details are purposely smudged out by those wishing to portray him as a loner with a chip on his shoulder, an anarchist, an attention seeker, or of unsound mind.

Read the full article in the London Progressive Journal

Civil rights attorney Madar takes on the controversial story of Private Bradley Manning, the young man responsible for exfiltrating to WikiLeaks almost half a million confidential U.S military documents (as well as the “Collateral Murder” video in which American soldiers in a helicopter fire on Iraqi civilians). The author provides a brief biography of Manning, beginning with his childhood in Oklahoma, and moving through his enlistment and training, during which time Manning, a self-described gay atheist, struggled to acclimate to life in the military. Sprinkled throughout are selections from chatlogs of conversations between Manning and Adrian Lamo, the hacker and former confidant responsible for reporting Manning to the authorities. As a result, Manning was sent to Quantico Marine Corps Base where he was placed in solitary confinement for nine months and where he remains incarcerated. Madar maintains that Manning is “a poster child for the cause of honest dealing, patriotic dissent, and the right to know what one’s government is doing,” for which actions the author deems Manning deserving of a Presidential Medal of Freedom. Madar makes a compelling and passionate case, not just for one individual’s actions, but for the re-examination of the rules of engagement, the government’s classification system, and the treatment of whistleblowers in the U.S.

See the complete review in Publishers Weekly

Mahmoud Salem @Sandmonkey
For when and where the revolution will be and other important info, go here: http://bit.ly/Jan25egypt
09:51:18 p.m. Jan 24

Hossam @3arabawy
streets r empty. Police r everywhere. #Jan25
09:27:57 a.m. Jan 25

Adam Makary @adamakary
#Jan25 protester’s demands: increase in minimum wage, dismissal of interior ministry, removal of emergency law, shorten presidential term
10:15:08 a.m. Jan 25

Manar Mohsen @ManarMohsen
Those tweeting about the protest in Egypt, please use the hashtag #Jan25 in order to spread any information.
10:54:41 a.m. Jan 25

Sarahngb @Sarahngb
Tahrir square looks scary. Cordons, policemen, fire trucks, CS trucks. #Jan25
11:38:28 a.m. Jan 25

Read the full excerpt in Lapham’s Quarterly

A collective of writers for the 99 percent have created a very interesting new book for OR Books, distributed by Haymarket Books. They’ve employed a unique writing method to chronicle the many details within the movement of Occupying Wall Street. A team of nearly 60 writers with rotating membership, collaborated on the describing the intricate structures and daily life of the movement such as running the general assembly, how the security and medical center operate and then the stories of the activists involved.

Hear the interview on Law and Disorder Radio

You may not have heard of the “Creech 14,” but they have a special place in the heart of the anti-drone movement. If you saw a photo of the group, you might think they had just walked out of Sunday mass; indeed, some of its members are priests and nuns. But whether clergy or not, all are spiritually rooted in a theology that calls on people of faith to stand up against injustice-in deeds, not just words.

And so on April 9, 2009, the group of fourteen activists entered Creech Air Force base-where teams of young soldiers remotely operate many of America’s killer drones-protesting what they considered war crimes taking place inside. As they crossed onto the base, the group invited staff nearby to share a Good Friday meal with them. They were then told to leave, and when they refused, they were arrested, charged with trespassing and held in jail until Easter Sunday.

Read the full excerpt in AlterNet

Via Al Jazeera English

The UK’s first book award celebrating radical, leftwing writing has been launched, with a tweet-by-tweet history of the Egyptian revolution and Owen Jones’s exploration of the demonisation of the working classes, Chavs, competing for the inaugural prize.

The Bread and Roses award for radical publishing – named after the slogan chanted in 1912 by striking textile workers in Massachusetts, who struck for “bread, and for roses too” – is looking for books “informed by socialist, anarchist, environmental, feminist and anti-racist concerns”, which also “inspire, support or report on political and/or personal change”. Run by the newly-formed Alliance of Radical Booksellers, the prize has no corporate sponsorship and believes it is the UK’s only literary award with explicitly leftwing entry criteria.

“Radical publishing is going through a renaissance, making the establishment of the Bread and Roses award timely,” said trustee Ross Bradshaw from Five Leaves Publishing, a literary and radical press. His fellow trustee Nik Gorecki, of Housmans Bookshop, added that “the central involvement of radical bookshops in the establishment and running of the Bread and Roses award also really sets it apart from other book prizes”.

Read the full article in the Guardian

This book by two leading US civil rights lawyers provides both documentary evidence and a clear accessible narrative to clarify a number of disputed aspects about the life and death of Argentinian revolutionary, Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara, and the early years of the Cuban Revolution. The principal facts established are: 1) that Che did not leave Cuba in 1965 because of a split with Fidel Castro, leader of the Cuban Revolution of 1959; 2) ‘that the US government, particularly its Central Intelligence Agency, had Che murdered, having secured the participation of its Bolivian client state’; and 3) that the Cuban’s foreign policy was independent of, and even antipathetic to the interests of the USSR.

These facts may not be controversial to supporters of the Cuban Revolution and those knowledgeable about US imperialism’s modus operandi in Latin America. However, as the authors point out, the idea that ‘the United States, and particularly the CIA, was not implicated in Che’s murder, has been accepted by almost every writer on the subject’. This includes the authors of the major biographies of Che published around the 30th anniversary of his execution in Bolivia in 1997; ‘none of these writers consider the CIA’s own admission that it had tried to assassinate Che, as well as Fidel Castro and his brother Raul, on various occasions when they were in Cuba’. Likewise, the notion of a split between Che and Fidel, and the crude caricature of Cuban internationalism as an instrument of USSR’s foreign policy, continue to be repeated by bourgeois and left commentators.

Read the full review on The New Left Project

See additional footage on RT America

“If you’re trying to understand China the language issues are secondary. The real problem is this is a country ruled through the suppression of historical memory. The Communists’ legitimacy rests on the claim that only stultifying bureaucracy and patriarchy can keep it together; that it is “not ready” for democracy; indeed that it was never ready.

“But delve into Chinese literature, and history, and a more much more complex picture emerges. After the May Fourth 1919 protests, the intelligentsia embraced modernity and fought for it. The early 20th century produced the Chinese Dickens and a whole legion of Orwells. The late 20th century produced a generation of novelists whose sufferings during the Cultural Revolution pushed them towards everything from magic realism to cyberpunk.

“What follows are 10 books that influenced me in the writing of Rare Earth: five must-read Chinese novels, five western-authored non-fiction books worth reading.”

Read his Paul Mason’s list in the Guardian

It’s probably no accident that the minimalist brown cover of Occupying Wall Street, the new title from OR Books about the now world-famous Manhattan movement, resembles the posters that, for a few months in 2011, came to define Zuccotti Park’s skyline. The title and subtitle—”The Inside Story of an Action that Changed America”—are written in black scrawl, adding extra authenticity to the stylization. It’s not just a book you’re holding, a reader soon realizes, it’s also a mini-protest sign.

Fair warning up front: A little rectangular box on the back cover reads, “All profits from this book will be donated to Occupy Wall Street.” If you’re certain you disagree with OWS and don’t want to support their cause, then this book is probably not for you. But if you’re at all interested in how the now-global movement began, there’s probably no better resource than this.

Though Occupying’s author is a collective of roughly 60 unnamed people calling themselves “Writers for the 99%,” the book is not a disjointed assortment of individual essays. Rather, and perhaps surprisingly, it acts as a concise historical account that sheds light on the varied and interesting minutia of OWS, covering everything from the guidelines of the General Assembly to the infamous Brooklyn Bridge protest to the drama created by class and racial tensions within the movement. So thorough is Occupying that even the thousands of people who lived in Zuccotti’s tent city themselves last year could probably learn something about the inner workings of the mass they once helped compose, or reinvigorate the fire that brought them there in the first place.

Read the full review in Good