Pacific Free Press was launched in March 2007 by Dutch-Canadian Richard
Kastelein of V.O.F. Expathos, in the Netherlands along with Chris Cook- CFUV radio journalist and Editor in Chief of Pacific Free Press. Cook is based in , Victoria, British Columbia.
The site is a sister to Atlantic Free Press and Brick Ogden an American Expatriate in Amsterdam has been a key supporter of this project.
The mission of Pacific Free Press is simple: to dig out nuggets of truth from
the slag-heap of lies, ignorance and witless diversion that has buried
public discourse today. Pacific Free Press provides a new venue for
disseminating hard news and insightful, fact-based analysis of the
harsh realities too often ignored or distorted by the mainstream press.
About 47 of us spent 8 or 9 hours yesterday in jail for protesting a man who, at least when he woke up yesterday morning, only thought of himself as on the side of those who protest power.
While hundreds of us lined the hallways outside Chairman John Conyers' office, one of his staffers approached the door to his office but was unable to enter. The place was wall-to-wall media inside, with Cindy Sheehan, Ray McGovern, and Rev. Lennox Yearwood giving a press conference in Conyers' office in his absence. They'd gone in to speak with Conyers, but it would take him quite a while to show up.
The staffer was annoyed and complained to his colleague "It's bad
enough they shut the office down with phone calls." Another staffer,
this one rather pleased about it (the police, too, were on our side and
three of them quietly accepted Impeach Bush and Cheney shirts), told me
they were getting a pro-impeachment phone call every 30 seconds. They
were also flooded with Emails and with thousands of faxes yesterday.
But the message was not getting through to the Congressman.
He
and several staffers met with Sheehan, McGovern, and Yearwood. It was a
heated discussion. Conyers began by proposing to discuss impeachment
sometime in August at a town hall meeting. We've been doing those for
years. We held a huge one in Detroit in May that Conyers agreed to
speak at. He showed up and left before it started. Yearwood, Sheehan,
and McGovern told Conyers his time was up.
What was Conyers'
objection to moving forward on impeachment now? Well, he said, if he
were to do that Fox News would go after him and accuse him of being
partisan. I kid you not. The Democratic Chairman of the U.S. House
Judiciary Committee is basing his decisions on whether a Republican
cable TV station would approve. As Cindy Sheehan told me outside the
jail last night: "If I based my decisions on Fox, I would never do
anything."
As long as Conyers is working for Fox, maybe our next sit-in needs to be in their studios.
But
Conyers expressed another concern as well. He's concerned about his
legacy. I wish there were a kind way to tell him that he is about to
flush it down the toilet. Conyers' judiciary committee staffers, who
were in the meeting yesterday, including Ted Kalo, Perry Appelbaum, and
Jonathan Godfrey, produced a year and a half ago one of the best
reports summarizing and documenting the crimes of Bush and Cheney.
Conyers is aware that Bush and Cheney are killing people every day that
he refrains from fulfilling his oath of office. He knows that nearly a
million Iraqis and 4,000 U.S. troops lie dead already. He knows that
this president and vice president kidnap, torture, and murder human
beings. But when pressed to act with the urgency appropriate to saving
lives, Conyers replied that our nation has always killed people and
that he wasn't "going to play politics."
At other times, Conyers
told our delegation that they needed to wise up and move from working
on justice to doing politics. But politics has become a bad word
because of the way Conyers uses it. He places elections highest in the
order of priorities and refuses to do his job in between elections
because that would be "politics."
We elected Democrats in 2006
so that Conyers would have the committee chairmanship and move on
impeachment. If he fails to act, he will quickly discover that
yesterday was just a warm-up.
This Thursday and Friday,
members of ImpeachForPeace.org, World Can't Wait, and After Downing
Street will meet to discuss impeachment with Congress Members Maxine
Waters and Keith Ellison, and with the offices of Jerrold Nadler, Adam
Schiff, Robert Wexler, and Debbie Wasserman Schultz. We'll be
delivering petitions for impeachment from all over the country.
Now is the moment for every member of Congress to take a stand for justice. Which side are you on, John?
Your
legacy, Chairman Conyers, is about to be remade by the American people,
and all the good and noble things you have done will be overshadowed by
your grand finale: the enabling of fascism in our country.
Writings 
About 47 of us spent 8 or 9 hours yesterday in jail for protesting a man who, at least when he woke up yesterday morning, only thought of himself as on the side of those who protest power. 
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