Minnesota's Congressional districts have changed for the 2012 election; every 10 years they are redistricting to suit population changes. The state tries to avoid gerrymandering but inevitable conflicts arise: I find myself now in the 4th Congressional district where 2 incumbents, Democrat Betty McCollum and Republican Michelle Bachmann will fight for the seat.
There are also 15 open seats for state & federal Congresspeople-- a sure sign of population growth, and new opportunities for new leadership. People have often told me I should run...
For now, my drive is just to meet with both Betty & Michelle, about the looming cloud of
war against Iran. Obviously the threat there isn't new, but the governments of the US & Israel are pushing for war anew.
I want anyone running for office to hear out these facts below. Take a stand against war with Iran-- after all we could be so close to peace with them instead! Peace takes effort but less effort & cost than war. I'm not the only one insisting on this-- I'll definitely be bringing friends with me. It always helps to have signatures & a good number of people with you to meet with your Congressperson.
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see below: "5 year old Samar and her dazed brother after US military opened fire on their family car killing both her parents in 2005. Getty Photographer Chris Hondros was himself later killed on the front lines in Misurata, Libya (see attached NYT story). There are over 16 million kids under the age of 14 who live in Iran
who don’t want to suffer like Samar’s family and hundreds of thousands of other Iraqis.
DON’T IRAQ IRAN
The Undersigned Urge Our U.S. Representative to Support:
Diplomacy, Not War, With Iran! 
Support HR 4173!
A bill supporting diplomacy, not war, with Iran, has recently been introduced in the House of Representatives by Rep. Barbara Lee. The bill, HR 4173, is entitled the Prevent Iran from Acquiring Nuclear Weapons and Stop War Through Diplomacy Act. We need as many Representatives as possible to co-sponsor this bill, since it is an important counterweight to Congressional pressure on President Obama to abandon diplomacy.
In addition to the diplomacy bill above, there are two ill-informed and ill-motivated bills in Congress that could bring us closer to a war with Iran: House Resolution 568, and Senate Resolution 380. Both of these resolutions pressure the Obama administration to abandon diplomacy with Iran and support Israel's red line for attacking Iran, which is nuclear weapons capability rather than actual possession of a nuclear weapon. Currently, President Obama's red line for attacking Iran is possession of a nuclear weapon, so these bills pressure him to take a more militaristic stance. Not only would this action bring us closer to war with Iran, it would also make enemies of numerous countries around the world who have nuclear weapons capability but have not manufactured a nuclear warhead.
Face That Screamed War’s Pain Looks Back, 6 Hard Years Later 
MOSUL, Iraq — Until the past week, Samar Hassan had never glimpsed the photograph of her that millions had seen, never knew it had become one of the most famous images of the Iraq war.
“My brother was sick, and we were taking him to the hospital and on the way back, this happened,” Samar said. “We just heard bullets.
“My mother and father were killed, just like that.”
The image of Samar, then 5 years old, screaming and splattered in blood after American soldiers opened fire on her family’s car in the northern town of Tal Afar in January 2005, illuminated the horror of civilian casualties and has been one of the few images from this conflict to rise to the pantheon of classic war photography. The picture has gained renewed attention as part of a large body of work by Chris Hondros, the Getty Images photographer recently killed on the front lines in Misurata, Libya.
The photograph of Samar is frozen in history, but her life moved on, across a trajectory that is emblematic of what so many Iraqis have endured. In a country whose health care system has almost no ability to treat the psychological aspects of trauma, thousands of Iraqis are left alone with their torment.
Now a striking 12-year-old, Samar lives on the outskirts of Mosul in a two-story house with four other families, mostly relatives.
The household is a cramped bustle of activity as women cook and clean and children scramble about. Samar’s older sister, Intisar, and her husband, an unemployed former police officer, care for her. Two of his sons are policemen, and their salaries support the extended family.
The pains of war have been visited on thousands of Iraqis, but even here Samar’s story stands apart. Three years after her parents were killed, her brother Rakan died when an insurgent attack badly damaged the house where she lives now. Rakan had been seriously wounded in the shooting that killed their parents, and he was sent to Boston for treatment after Mr. Hondros’s photos were published. An American aid worker, Marla Ruzicka, who helped arrange for Rakan’s treatment, was herself later killed in a car bomb in Baghdad.
Intisar’s husband, Nathir Bashir Ali, suspects his house was bombed by insurgents as retribution for sending Rakan to the United States. “When Rakan came back from America, everyone thought I was a spy,” he said.
Samar left school last year because she was too shy and not doing well, Mr. Ali said, although Samar said she would like to return and hoped to be a doctor when she grew up. She leaves the house only on infrequent family excursions and has two friends who visit to play with dolls and chat. She spends her days cleaning, listening to music on her purple MP3 player and watching episodes of her favorite television show, the Turkish soap opera “Forbidden Love,” about lovers named Mohanad and Samar.
“I am Samar,” she said, wearing a long red dress and sitting on the couch next to Mr. Ali. Two of her siblings, also in the car when their parents were killed, sat nearby.
“I’ve taken them many times to the hospital, where they get pills” for emotional problems, Mr. Ali said. “All of them take pills.”
He says Samar’s 8-year-old brother, Muhammad, talks to himself when he is alone. “When we go out and see a family, they get sad,” he said. Sometimes he finds the children in a room together, crying. “When they remember the accident, it’s like they just died.”
The photo of Samar had far-reaching impact, for it was visual testimony to a particular scourge of this war: the shooting of innocent civilians as they approached American checkpoints or foot patrols, killings made possible by liberal rules of engagement aiming to protect soldiers from suicide car bombers. The image was a point of discussion at the highest reaches of the Pentagon as it considered ways to reduce civilian casualties.
The Iraq war delivered few singular images for the popular imagination, partly because the country was too dangerous for photographers to move around freely, but also because in an age of saturated media coverage and short attention spans, it may be more difficult for news images to take root in the collective memory.
The military also set strict rules for embedded journalists that kept many graphic images from the public eye; the military asked Mr. Hondros to leave his embed assignment after he shot the pictures of Samar.
Liam Kennedy, a professor at University College Dublin, researches conflict photography and uses Mr. Hondros’s image of Samar in his class as one of the few photos from the Iraq war that could stand out in history, comparing it to the famous Vietnam image by the Associated Press photographer Nick Ut of a young girl running from a napalm attack.
“It really seems to say something of what’s going on at the time,” Professor Kennedy said. “All the arbitrariness of the violence that was going on at that time is summed up by that girl.”
Sarah Leah Whitson, director of the Middle East and North Africa division for Human Rights Watch, keeps a copy of the photo on a bulletin board in her office in New York. She remembers crying when she first saw the photo in a newspaper, and having to explain the image to her children.
“At the time, I thought it captured perfectly the horrors of the war that was not really understood by Americans,” she said. “Everything in that girl’s face symbolized what I felt all Iraqis must feel.”
She added, “I kept thinking, ‘I wonder what life will be like for this girl?’ ”
Mr. Hondros spoke about the photograph in a 2007 interview with the syndicated news program “Democracy Now.”
“I think one of the reasons the photo had this sort of resonance that it does is because it has a sort of empty feeling,” he said. “You know, the poor girl, all alone in the world now, just standing there in the dark.”
This week Samar, hugging a pillow to her chest, recalled: “He was taking pictures of me, I remember. Then he stopped, and they brought me a jacket and put me in the truck and treated the wound on my hand. And they gave me some toys.”
She had never seen the picture until this week, but she said she understood that it showed the world “the sad thing that is happening in Iraq.”
Near the end of the interview, she pointed to a family photograph on the wall. “I always dream about my father and mother and brother,” she said.
By Tim Arango, New York Times. Duraid Adnan contributed reporting.
Resolving the Iran situation peacefully
1. Economic Sanction is an act of war. The current sanctions on Iran are the strongest ever practiced on a nation. The victims of sanctions are people not their government.
2. Economic and military attacks on Iran threaten to cause an explosive regional conflict, disrupt the global economy, and undermine the efforts of the democratic opposition by strengthening the Iranian government which will be seen as “under foreign siege”.
3. Iran does not pose a military threat to the United States and, as our own intelligence community states, it is far from developing a nuclear weapon at this time.
4. Lately Israeli officials have admitted that Iran does not pose a nuclear threat to its security either, but that the real issue is a change in the regional balance of power if Iran should develop nuclear weapons capability.
5. Iran feels threatened already by US presence in the region: The US military in Afghanistan and Iraq barricades Iran. The US also has military bases in Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirate, Kuwait and Bahrain, effectively surrounding Iran. Bahrain also hosts the U.S. 5th fleet. In fact, the Persian Gulf currently hosts 2 US Carrier Groups, and a third is on the way for ‘special ops’.
6. Instead of military threats and crippling sanctions that cause collective suffering among the people of Iran, the US needs to engage in diplomatic negotiations with Iran without pre-conditions. Pre-conditions are based on inequality of the parties in a negotiation. They are a coercive measure that undermines negotiations by assuming that the party on whom they fall is unworthy, and in many cases, by putting the desired result ahead of the negotiation process.
7. Now that Iran and Afghanistan have signed a mutual support treaty, the US can benefit from Iranian help with regional negotiations to end the war in Afghanistan. Iran is also well positioned to extend diplomatic support to help stabilize Iraq.
8. We believe there is a policy alternative concerning development of nuclear weapons. It is in the interest of the US, Iran, and Israel to create a Nuclear Weapons Free Zone in the Middle East. A regional ban on all nuclear weapons — Not only weapons that Iran or other nations might develop in the future, but also the nuclear weapons already held by Israel. We believe the US should promote this option, which is already favored by majorities of Israeli Jews, and of Iranians.
Fact Sheet
Fact: Iran does not possess a nuclear weapon.
Fact: Iran has the right, according to international law, to develop nuclear energy for civilian use.
Fact: Iran’s nuclear energy program is regularly monitored by the International Atomic Energy Agency.
Fact: In past 200 years Iran has never started a war.
Fact: The United States possesses 10,600 nuclear warheads in its stockpile, 7,982 of which are deployed and 2,700 of which are in a contingency stockpile. The total number of nuclear warheads that have been built from 1951 to present is 67,500.
Fact: The United States is the only country to have ever used nuclear weapons. It did so when it incinerated hundreds of thousands of Japanese people living in the cities of Nagasaki and Hiroshima. Neither city had any military significance.
Fact: The United States has spent $7 trillion on nuclear weapons. The U.S. military budget for 2012alone is about equal to Iran’s entire Gross National Product.
Fact: Israel, the largest recipient of U.S. foreign aid (about $3 billion in 2011), unlike Iran, possesses hundreds of nuclear weapons.
Fact: Israel, unlike Iran, refuses to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, or allow the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) into Israel to monitor its nuclear program.
Fact: There is active discussion in the Israeli media about whether Israel will carry out military strikes against Iran’s nuclear energy facilities. Israel bombed similar nuclear civilian energy facilities in Iraq in 1981 (“Operation Babylon”) and in Syria in 2007 (“Operation Orchard”).
Fact: The United States and Britain used severe economic sanctions and CIA covert operatives to overthrow the democratically elected government of Iran led by Dr. MohammadMosaddegh in 1953. The Iranian government under Mosaddegh had nationalized the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (AIOC), which became known as British Petroleum (BP), in a campaign to use oil profits to eradicate widespread poverty within Iran. The successful CIA and British Intelligence coup d’état put the Shah of Iran (King) back in power.
Fact: The United States broke diplomatic relations with Iran and has pursued a policy of economic sanctions against the country since the Revolution of 1979.
Fact: Iran’s oil reserves are the fourth largest in the world—it has 12.7 percent of the world’s known oil reserves. That makes Iran’s oil reserves second only to Saudi Arabia in the Middle East, greater than those of Iraq.
Fact: The new economic sanctions against Iran include a ban on the import, sale and trade of Iranian oil, which constitutes half of Iran’s Gross National Product. It forbids any company in the world that does any business with Iran or its Central Bank from having any trade or economic transaction with a U.S. bank or corporation.
Fact: The economic sanctions are an effort to create economic suffering in Iran and to deprive the country of the goods and services to sustain life. According to international law, these economic sanctions constitute a blockade or an act of war against Iran even though Iran poses no threat to the people of the United States or Europe."
