Four Years of CODEPINK Rabble-Rousing for Peace by Medea Benjamin

[CODEPINK]

We started CODEPINK four years ago, shortly after the Bush administration had announced its color-coded alert system. Remember? It was yellow for mellow, orange for high alert, and red was-well, red. We felt the color-coded alerts were a way to manipulate people's post-9/11 fears to justify invading Iraq. We started a new color code, CODEPINK, to say, "Yes, let's bring to justice those who attacked us on 9/11, but let's not wage war on a country that had nothing to do with 9/11." Invading Iraq, as we wrote in a report after our first fact-finding trip to Baghdad before the US invasion, "would be disastrous for the Iraqi people and make us less safe here at home."
Four years later, we have unfortunately been proven all too right. Iraq is indeed a disaster, with some 100 Iraqis dying violent deaths every day. Almost 3,000 of our soldiers have died. We are sinking $8 billion a month into this quagmire, with no end in sight. And we are not, as the recent intelligence report confirms, safer at home.
While many people who joined anti-war rallies early on have since retreated, becoming part of the silent majority who oppose the war, we at CODEPINK have been protesting this war non-stop. We've camped out in the freezing rain outside the White House and in the sweltering heat outside Bush's ranch in Crawford. We went without food for 80 days as part of a fast to bring the troops home. We've stood outside high schools and career fairs encouraging young people not to join the military, provided support to soldiers who refuse to go, and lobbied for veterans' benefits under the banner "Love the Troops, Hate the War." We've lobbying our elected officials, helped organize at congressional hearings, passed local anti-war resolutions and campaigned statewide to bring home our National Guard. We've dogged warmakers and supporters from George Bush to Karl Rove to Hillary Clinton, popping up in "pink slips" at their fundraisers, speeches, parties and homes to tell them their services are no longer desired.
All the while, we've been working closely with Iraqis. We hosted Iraqi women on speaking tours throughout the U.S. and raised funds to help refugees. We traveled to Iraq six times to deepen our knowledge and our networks, and when it became too dangerous (one of our delegations was held up at gunpoint and one of our colleagues killed), we began meeting with Iraqis in Jordan instead. Just last month, we met with Iraqi Parliamentarians to support their efforts at Sunni-Shia reconciliation.
We've been hauled off to jail-over the over again-when we brought our anti-war message to the Democratic and Republican conventions, the United Nations, Senate offices, congressional hearings, political fundraisers, Halliburton shareholder meetings and Pentagon briefings. We've been banned for life from the National Press Club, banned from several military bases, banned from the area around Congress, banned from the United Nations. One of us was even banned from Washington DC for an entire year!
Sadly, despite our efforts and those of hundreds of other peace groups, we have not been able to stop the war. Nor have we been able to spark a truly mass movement. But CODEPINK groups have sprung up in over 250 communities at home and abroad, we have over 150,000 on our email list, we have trained hundreds of new activists, and we have helped turned the tide of public opinion. While early on peace activists were vilified by the press as unpatriotic Saddam-lovers, today we represent the majority of Americans who say this war was a mistake and want to see a speedy withdrawal of our troops. We also represent the majority of Iraqis, who in poll after poll have shown that they want U.S. troops to leave.

[theSaiGirl]

1. Code Pink and Medea Benjamin = gatekeeping the Left

Gatekeeping against the truth about 9/11.
Probably so she can keep collecting those NGO and corporate-foundation grants....

===================================================================
Disproportionate Influence and a Profound Conflict of Interest

Medea Benjamin and Kevin Danaher co-founded the international human rights organization Global Exchange 17 years ago. In that time they have been consistently clear and outspoken with their views on war and Neoliberalism—more commonly known as corporate globalization. Because of their combined intellectual acuity and renowned fearlessness, Benjamin's media savvy, and the access they have been granted through some of their more prominent benefactors such as the MacArthur Foundation and billionaire financier George Soros, they have come to command a high level of visibility in progressive politics.

Benjamin has fast made a name for herself as a leading figure in the "anti-war movement" with well-publicized media stunts at the Republican and Democratic Conventions, disruptions of FCC and Congressional hearings, and frequent trips to the Middle East to showcase the suffering of the Iraqi and Afghani people. She also benefits from her proximity to well-known "progressive" leaders, celebrities, and journalists. Alongside her Code Pink Women for Peace, and Danaher's Green Festivals, Global Exchange has come to command a significant market share in the larger peace and justice community, reaping enormous "street cred" within the activist world.

Benjamin also wields a disproportionate amount of weight within the Green Party of the United States, having run for Senator of California on their ticket in 2000, and within the anti-war umbrella group United for Peace and Justice, where she sits on their Steering Committee and is arguably their most influential member. As testament, Benjamin and her Global Exchange/Code Pink cadre were the authors of three of the five proposals passed by UFPJ at the February Assembly.

But during the 2004 Presidential campaign, Benjamin's message and tone began to shift dramatically into what came to be known as the "ABB" movement—Anybody But Bush. She and eighty fellow prominent leaders who once formed the one hundred-thirteen member "Nader 2000 Citizens Committee" put forth a petition urging anti-war Nader not to run, and instead threw their support behind pro-war Democratic Party candidate John Kerry. At the Green Party National Convention in Milwaukee last June Benjamin campaigned heavily for "safe-state" candidate David Cobb, who was also unabashedly ABB and even initially pledged not to run in swing states, though he now denies it. Benjamin cajoled Greens into neither nominating Nader nor giving him the official endorsement he and running mate Peter Camejo had publicly sought from the party.

The pro and con arguments of ABB have been argued exhaustively, and many do not find the issue relevant any longer. But they are relevant when considering just how UFPJ became ABB and has since found itself embroiled in partisan politics working to attack exclusively the Bush Administration and their competing Neoconservative movement, despite the fact that American war policy is a bipartisan program.

http://www.newtopiamagazine.net/articles/40