CODEPINK invites all who love peace to join its Campaign of Non-violent Actions to Ground Killer Drones.
The drone era of endless war began in 2001 with the US invasion of Afghanistan. Then, in 2003, the US invaded Iraq for a second time, resulting in more than a million casualties, fueling civil war and creating millions of refugees. These two wars created a domino effect that savaged five other countries, spreading death and destruction on a continental scale.
Since 2009 CodePink protesters, along with hundreds of other peacemakers, have been arrested at drone bases worldwide. At Creech Air Force Base, because it is the brain of the US’s worldwide killer drone network. At Ramstein AFB, in Germany, the heart of the killer drone network. At Beale AFB, California’s crucial drone surveillance base. And and other bases that extend the killer drone network’s reach worldwide.
We demand that the US government cease the indiscriminate killing, injury, and trauma dealt out to civilians in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Somalia, Iraq, Yemen, Syria, and Libya by military drones and perpetual wars.
CodePink, drone whistle-blowers, and independent researchers all dispute the government’s claim that the use of drones is a surgically precise and effective tool that makes the US safer by enabling “targeted killing” of “terrorists,” with minimal collateral damage. On the contrary, thousands of non-combatants, even American citizens, have been killed in covert drone missions, along with the destruction of hospitals, schools, mosques, infrastructure, towns and cities. The risk of blowback attacks is increasing, though proportionally still very small, and the global refugee crisis worsens by the week. Drone attacks, the “face of US militarism,” are clearly counter-productive, threatening any chance of even a fragmented appearance of global peace anytime soon. And with President Trump’s administration escalating drone assassination in his first weeks in office, as evidenced by 10 US drone victims in Yemen in his first few days and 49 people killed by a US Reaper drone on March 16 while praying in a mosque near Aleppo, Syria, the urgent need for mass resistance is stronger than ever.
Numerous peace & justice groups, including Nevada Desert Experience, Voices for Creative Nonviolence and Veterans for Peace, are co-sponsors of the 3rdAnnual Shut Down Creech, 2017, with CODEPINK.An annual collaborative peace convergence, that included participants from 20 different US States last year, takes place again next month across from Creech Air Force Base, a key drone control center, just north of Las Vegas in the Nevada desert.
This weeklong national mobilization to peacefully resist drone killing and global militarization culminates in a mass civil resistance to halt “business as usual” at Creech AFB by blocking commuter traffic entering the gates for as long as possible. It is a united stand, calling for the US government to conduct a fundamental re-evaluation…