The illegal 2011 overthrow of the Libyan government subjected the people of that nation and surrounding nations to violence, weapons proliferation, chaos, and desperate insecurity. In no way will compounding the problem with the same approach again improve matters in this case or establish good precedents.

It's time to free Leonard Peltier and send him home. His co-defendent was freed years ago. Keeping him in prison is just plain wrong!

The United States has hundreds of programs at universities, think tanks, and research institutes that claim to devote their attention to “security” and “defense” studies. Yet in almost all of these programs that receive many millions of dollars in Federal funding, the vast majority of research, advocacy and instruction have nothing to do with climate change, the most serious threat to security of our age. In an act of profound intellectual irresponsibility, so-called scholars of "security studies" spend their hours imagining fantastic military scenarios, rather than responding to incontrovertible threat of climate change which scientists have unanimously identified as a reality. We cannot waste any more of our tax dollars on security and defense studies that fail to address the primary threat to the well-being of the United States, and of the world. The time has come to put an end to this insanity. We demand that all programs of defense and security studies in the United States identify in their statement of purpose climate change as the primary security threat to the United States and that they dedicate at least 70% of their budgets to research, teaching and advocacy to the critical topics of mitigation of (primarily) and adaptation to (secondarily) climate change. Any program that fails to focus on climate change in this manner should lose its status for Federal funding. Mitigation of, and adaptation to, climate change should be the primary concerns for all in security and defense field studies. Obviously other security issues deserve study, but granted the fact that the cost of climate change will run in the trillions of dollars over the next decade, and even more beyond then, we do not have the funds to support programs that are not dedicated to addressing this immediate threat. Signers include: Emanuel Yi Pastreich Director The Asia Institute David Swanson Director World Beyond War John Kiriakou Associate fellow Institute for Policy Studies John Feffer Director Foreign Policy in Focus Norman Solomon Cofounder RootsAction.org Coleen Rowley Retired FBI agent and former Minneapolis Division legal counsel

Since 1979, the US interventionist foreign policy has created civil wars or failed states all over the Middle East, North Africa and Eastern Europe -- the so-called "arc of instability" that the US has itself created. Most obviously, we have seen sectarian killing in Iraq, a failed state in Libya dominated by ISIS, and now an ISIS terrorist state in Syria and Iraq. These interventions do not serve the interests of the American people. In fact, they have violated American ideals of human rights, self determination, the rule of law and, in most cases, democracy. They have also resulted in blowback from people seeking revenge and indoctrinated with the extreme Islamism of our purported allies. They serve only the interests of arms manufacturers, military contractors and the minority of US military, CIA and State Department personnel who are motivated by personal aggrandizement rather than true patriotism. Rep. Gabbard is a veteran of Afghanistan and Iraq and a member of the House Armed Services committee. She has spoken out against these policies, for example in interviews with Wolf Blitzer (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u7Q8X60KQ9Q) and Scott Simon (http://www.npr.org/2015/12/12/459464247/are-efforts-to-overthrow-assad-counter-productive), and in the halls of Congress itself. Rep. Gabbard, please keep doing what you are doing. Know that Americans who are paying attention appreciate all that you do and that we "have your back." Please share this with others of both parties who are speaking out against these bipartisan neocon/liberal interventionist policies.

Since 2011, the United States has sold a great deal of weapons. But the U.S. government has stopped reporting on its own and other nations' arms sales. CRS has its own internal government sources of information. The report it used to produce is not duplicated by any other publication. The United States is no longer documenting one of its biggest and most deadly businesses. In 2012, Richard Grimmett retired from the Congressional Research Service. He had been the chief author of its reports on international weapons sales and transfers. It is thanks to those reports that we know, with some reliability, that as of 2011 the United States accounted for 79% of the value of transfer agreements to ship weapons to governments in the Middle East, 79% also to poor nations around the world, and 77% of the value of total agreements to ship weapons to other countries. We can compare these numbers with earlier years, but not with later ones. Even if Congress doesn't want to know, it should not get away with denying us that right. Background: CRS Report for Congress, Prepared for Members and Committees of Congress, Conventional Arms Transfers to Developing Nations, 2004-2011 http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/weapons/R42678.pdf

There are 52 detainees at Guantanamo Bay who have never been charged with any crime and have been cleared by all levels of government for transfer, meaning they have been found to pose no security threat to the U.S. or the world. Most of these detainees were cleared for transfer in 2009 but have remained at the facility because of complications with returning them to their home countries. Their continued and indefinite detention is a violation of the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights and human rights treaties to which the United States is a party. The U.S. Congress refuses to accept these cleared detainees onto our own soil because the American people have been misinformed on the subject and continue to believe that all detainees at the facility represent “the worst of the worst.” The Obama Administration, which is working to close the facility, is sending ambassadors around the world asking for sanctuary for these detainees in other countries. We as a country need to step up and take responsibility for our own mistakes; if these detainees are no security risk, as the government asserts, we should be ready to accept them on our own soil. Progressive, informed U.S. cities must take the lead on this, if the U.S. Congress will not. If this resolution passes, it will be a victory for human rights law and will send a message to our own community that we do not subscribe to Islamophobic fears based on ignorance and misinformation. It will promote a more inclusive city that is welcoming to people of all backgrounds, regardless of religion or ethnicity. Other cities have already passed such resolutions: ◦ Berkeley, CA resolution: http://www.nogitmos.org/berkeleytresolutionclosingguantanamo ◦ Amherst, MA resolution: http://www.nogitmos.org/proclamationunitednationsinternationaldaysupportvictimstorture ◦ Leverett, MA resolution: http://www.nogitmos.org/resolutiontownleverettmaassistsaferesettlementclearedguant%C3%A1namodetainees

The USA has been EXTRAORDINARILY NEGLIGENT in dealing with the problems it caused by dropping 240 million bombs on Laos without even declaring war. (The last time the USA declared war was in 1941.) The donations the USA makes to the clean up effort are miniscule. Pathetic is a word that comes to mind. You need to have a head honcho, office space in Vientiane and a few secretaries and that eats up most of the funds so there is precious little left over for actual cleaning up of the 80 million unexploded bombs. I would like to set up a bomb clearing project in Laos using HeroRats as used by apopo.org in Mozambique and now Cambodia to sniff out unexploded ordnance.

We need to be deactivating our nuclear capability not upgrading it.

The United States keeps nuclear weapons in Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, Italy and Turkey, in violation of the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), which bans the transfer of nuclear weapons from a nuclear weapon state to a non-nuclear weapon state. Now, the U.S. wants to upgrade its nukes in Europe, to make them "precision" and "guided," and therefore more likely to be used, even as tensions build between the United States and Russia. The U.S. plans to deploy newly designed type B 61-12 nuclear bombs. Instead it should remove existing nuclear bombs. The NATO strategy of so-called "nuclear sharing" is a violation of Articles 1 and 2 of the NPT. Those provisions state that every party to the treaty promises "not to transfer to any recipient whatsoever nuclear weapons or other nuclear explosive devices or control over such weapons or explosive devices directly, or indirectly" and also promises that every "non-nuclear-weapon State Party to the Treaty undertakes not to receive the transfer from any transferor whatsoever of nuclear weapons." The policy of placing U.S. nuclear weapons in Europe also violates local laws. For example, the German Parliament (the Bundestag) voted in March 2010, by a large majority, that the German Government should "press for the withdrawal of U.S. nuclear weapons from Germany."

A 2014 Gallup International survey found that, by a wide margin, people believe that the United States is the biggest threat to wold peace. It's hard to believe that these people want the US controlling their skies. A 1967 international agreement signed by all the major powers banned weapons from earth orbit. Several major powers (including the USA) have violated that ban. When one space faring nation explodes a competitor's satellite, each of thousands of high velocity pieces can destroy other "innocent" satellites for decades. Our planet must avoid an arms race in space.

* WIN/Gallup International’s annual global End of Year survey for 2013, among others, shows that the US is considered to be the greatest threat to peace in the world. We agree, and it's no surprise Gallup did not ask the question in its End of Year survey for 2014. * A 2012 study by Stanford and New York universities' law schools, and numerous reports in the UK's Guardian and Telegraph, The Atlantic, New York Times and others indicate that drone attacks create more terrorists than they kill, due to the high number of civilian casualties. We will never actually know how many civilians are casualties because the US government insists that all male victims of military age are "militants" or "terrorists" unless there is irrefutable posthumous evidence they are not. Even the US captured organization, Human Rights Watch (HRW), and the Council on Foreign Relations question the practice. * HRW says that Saudi-led airstrikes in Yemen appeared to violate international humanitarian law and could constitute war crimes with which the US is complicit. * Numerous reports in the UK's Guardian, New York Times, Der Spiegel and even the Washington Post confirm the CIA has been spending about $1 billion/year since 2012 helping the Saudis and Qatar arm Syrian rebels, with little regard for vetting as confirmed by the latest fiasco with US trained "rebels" turning arms over to al-Nusra immediately on entering Syria, then bragging that they had "fooled" the US. Seymour Hersh reported on the "ratline" of captured Libyan arms from Benghazi through Turkey to Syria. * The US can not afford the programs for the 99% that Bernie proposes as long as it is wasting trillions of dollars on the military and foreign interventions, and Bernie's "political revolution" needs to make this clear to poorly informed US voters. * Last, but most importantly, you don't protect the human rights of women, children and civilian men by killing hundreds of thousands of them and forcing them to flee their countries.

World Beyond War has outlined specific reforms that would democratize the United Nations, and make nonviolent actions the primary activity engaged in. Please read them here. http://worldbeyondwar.org/reforming-united-nations INITIAL SIGNERS: David Swanson Coleen Rowley David Hartsough Patrick Hiller Alice Slater Kevin Zeese Heinrich Buecker Norman Solomon Sandra Osei Twumasi Jeff Cohen Leah Bolger Robert Scheer