Veterans For Peace

Sometimes you go to the news. Other times, it’s vice-versa. Like today. Editing video at a workspace near West 7th Street in St. Paul, I noticed the flash of police lights out the window and grabbed my video camera to see what was going on. Peering through the window screen, I saw at least eight St. Paul Police and Transit Police cars stopped on the street and officers surrounding a red car, guns drawn. Two women and a man were removed from the car, and the man I recognized from the largely peaceful march by the Poor People’s Economic Human Rights campaign. All three were detained then released — told the car was on a federal “stop-and-search list” — and all are relatively high-profile and outspoken peace activists.

Jeff Patersen, founder of the California-based organization Courage to Resist, was the first US soldier to refuse to return to duty in Iraq during the Gulf War. Here he speaks out on behalf of veterans who have resisted stop-loss and violated their terms of duty in order to express dissent over the current Iraq war.
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When Code Pink’s Medea Benjamin took the stage at the Veterans for Peace rally in front of the State Capitol building today, where hundreds of activists gathered before marching towards the Xcel Energy Center, she started with the string of weekend raids on her mind: “This is not the Midwestern welcome we expected!”

To the strains of a lone bagpiper, a group of veterans gathered near the Minnesota Vietnam Memorial on Monday morning to call for an end to the Iraq War.

The gathering, organized by Veterans for Peace, was a sober affair, marked by sharp denunciations of war in general, as well as criticism of the Democratic Congress.

After [...]