Dear Friends,

Even with all the good will it seems as if the peace movement is stuck. Here’s a great new strategy that UFPJ can bring in all its members states. (See below) Congresswoman Betty Hall is working with her local citizens to have the New Hampshire state legislature call for impeachment. She says she is “ready to die for it.” As for me and Patrick Henry, “Give me liberty or give me death!” C-c-c-courage!!! Let’s work legislatively locally by getting all our state capitals to vote for impeachment, if things are so stuck in DC. And let’s study David Swanson’s proposal for what to do in Congress as Robert Jereski has urged us to do. www.downingstreet.org We should stop supporting any members of Congress—whichever party-- except the ones who won’t vote to fund the war. This has nothing to do with Democrats and Republicans. And we have to bring all the others on. This will have to be done locally by visiting our Congress critters (as Jim Hightower refers to them) at their home offices. Right now we are planning sit-ins at Jerry Nadler’s office in NY because he sits on the Judiciary Committee and has taken impeachment off the table! What a nerve he has!! Didn’t he read the Constitution lately!! He should know better, coming from the most liberal district in NY City, and being a lawyer, presumably well versed in the beauty of our laws and precious human rights. It’s impossible for us to act from Washington, given the “inside-the-beltway” culture. The lobbying must occur at home where you can collar your Congresscritter, look ‘em in the eye, and demand that they not vote funds for war and that they preserve our Civil Liberties.

There most definitely is a diplomatic solution to the crisis being manufactured over Iran’s nuclear ambitions--but it goes much further than the current impotent suggestions being offered for jaw-jaw rather than war-war with Iran. The US must honor its own disarmament agreement under the Non-Proliferation Treaty, put a halt to the development of new nuclear weapons, and take up Putin's offer of several years ago to cut our mutual nuclear arsenals of about 10,000 weapons to 1,000. Once the US and Russia get down to reasonable numbers approaching the arsenals of the other nuclear weapons states--China, UK, France and Israel, who have stockpiles in the hundreds, and India, Pakistan, and North Korea who have less than one hundred bombs in their arsenals-- then we can take up China's offer to negotiate a treaty to eliminate nuclear weapons and call all the nuclear weapons states to the table. Civil society has already produced a Model Nuclear Weapons Convention drafted by scientists, lawyers, and policy makers in the international Abolition 2000 Network, which was introduced into the UN General Assembly by Costa Rica as a discussion document. It lays out all the steps for dismantlement, verification, guarding, and monitoring the disassembled arsenals to insure that we will all be secure from nuclear break-out.