On June 28, 2009 the world heard from their radios, televisions, and newspapers that the president of Honduras, Manuel Zelaya, had been forcibly removed from the elected position. Most of the discussion in the United States media was monopolized by an argument on whether or not this was technically a coup. Those who supported the coup government argued that law in Honduras allowed and even demanded that other political forces in Honduras (the Supreme Court and the Army) remove Zelaya from power, legitimizing the military action that was taken. Those who support the Honduran resistance agree to debate within the framework the coup supporters established, failing to bring the core issue into the debate. The laws of Honduras, as the coup supporters cite them, are undemocratic safeguards put in place by those who have come to power by force and exploitation. They are the very thing the movement that had been in the streets after the coup wanted to change and has been denied.

Some would argue that those who deposed Manuel Zelaya were protecting democracy in Honduras, keeping presidents from having more power than they should by preventing the president from violating the constitution. A Wall Street Journal opinion piece claimed that in response to President Zelaya’s “heavy-handed tactics” “Honduras is fighting back by strictly following the constitution” in an attempt to demonize the populist leader and justify force against him and his supporters.

The current system has its roots in colonization. There are great economic disparities in Honduras as a result of economic and political exploitation. Europeans used force to gain power and establish Western governments throughout the Americas. The alliance that developed between politicians and business people in Honduras resulted in policies to force labor from the indigenous and working class populations and concentrate ‘legal’ control of land into the hands of a few (i.e. United Fruit Company). In Honduras majority rule favors the oppressed but the Constitution from 1982 restricts the options of Honduran Citizens and does not require the government to frequently consult the people through elections.

The coup plotters prioritized the constitution over the will of the people. The constitution was created immediately before the end of a ten year coup government. The problems with this constitution were the very issues that President Zelaya’s referendum was intended to allow the people of Honduras to vote on. Zelaya supporters and the movement to change the constitution wanted to make changes to protect their rights and increase the decision making power of the majority. It was this same questionable document that other branches of the government used as an excuse to prevent the Honduran people from deciding whether or not they should be allowed to vote to change the constitution. Zelaya intended to carry out this referendum without the permission of Congress, the Supreme Court, or the Military. He was removed from office, to the dismay of many Hondurans, because he threatened the established economic and political powers. The Interim government declared a state of emergency. In the name of protecting democracy from the will of the Honduran people, they suspended the rights ensured by the very constitution they claimed to be protecting, for 45 days.

Repression of media and demonstrators opposed to the interim government made fair presidential elections impossible last year. Media that criticized the interim government was shut down as a result of the suspension. Radio Globo is a major case of this; the radio station was taken off the air from September 28 until October 19. Demonstrators are being met with tear gas and riot police and the wealthy have hired infamous right-wing Colombian paramilitaries to protect their assets from those who want to dismantle the power structure in Honduras. A lack of free speech and political violence, which is said to have worsened after the elections, has made elections extremely unfair. National Part candidate Porfirio ”Pepe” Lobo Sosa had an advantage over all other canidates because of his support for the coup government and because the many people who would have supported Liberal or opposition candidates in another situation are choosing instead to boycott the elections. They decided instead to use their bodies as their ballots, showing up every day of the so-called interim government, and on special occasions during the new administration of Porfirio Pepe Lobo. On May Day hundreds of thousands of people demonstrated around the country in opposition to the current state.

The international focus on the crisis in Honduras had been correct in opposing the coup. However supporters of the overthrow of President Zelaya often argue that because Zelaya was violating Honduran law, his overthrow was permitted by the Supreme Court, congress and military. Reasonable people know that what happened was still wrong and they will recognize that because Honduran law has not been subject to the people it is not a legitimate argument in support of the continued path that those Hondurans with power have chosen. Recently there have been attempts to make the world think the problems in Honduras are over, as Hillary Clinton puts it, that “now it is time for the hemisphere as a whole to move forward and welcome Honduras back into the Inter-American community”. We need to remember why Zeleya was not allowed to remain president. We need to remember that the coup wasn’t about him, it was about sending a message to the left of Honduras. A message that says the poor are the slaves of business and the military.

It is tempting to call the new administration of Honduras a scab, hiding a neocolonial wound, but scabs are a part of a healing process. The so-called reconciliation happening in Honduras is not healing, but a cover-up of a worsening wound. Until the constitution and the government is subject to majority rule it will only be a perverted farce of democracy that shows the true nature of the republics that rule the Americas.

When I first heard about the “torture debate” in the United States, I could hardly believe it was happening. Why did we need to discuss something that was at once immoral and ineffective?

But when the Abu Ghraib photos surfaced, it became clear that not only was torture an issue, our government seemed determined to be on the wrong side of it. They twisted the Constitution to get legal justification, and took their case to the American people claiming it was a necessary evil, that there was no other way to obtain information from terrorists, information that could save hundreds or thousands or even millions of lives.

This despite the fact that every competent, unbiased study of the subject reveals that torture is at best ineffective and often counterproductive. King’s College, the World Health Organization, Fairleigh Dickinson University, and the CIA-all agree on torture’s ineffectiveness. Subjects simply tell interrogators either what they want to hear or carefully rehearsed lies.

Then what possible motive could we have for torture? For the Bush administration, it helped maintain the climate of fear so useful in the war on terror and perpetuated the the idea that we had to bend the rules to win.

Obama was swept into office on the promise of change including guarantees to eliminate the use of torture. Now he appears to be hedging, showing reluctance to examine methods used in prisoner interrogations and neglecting to ban rendition. We must continue to pressure him until we see decisive action.

Unfortunately, most of the United States agrees that there are circumstances where torture is justified; the “ticking time bomb” scenario is often cited by torture proponents as a situation where it could be rationalized despite all scientific evidence to the contrary.

No sane person will assert that torture is moral; instead, it is presented as the lesser of two evils, the only effective means to obtain vital information. For it to stop, the public must be educated on the inefficacy of torture, made aware of the unanimous expert’s opinion that it does not work. Only then can this insane, pointless cruelty be stopped.

Here at Armistice, we’ve been discussing the impact of new technologies on teenage communication. These forms of technology include texting, cell phone use, myspace, and facebook. We’ve been interested in the implications of these forms of communication on the development of normal human interaction. Are we losing crucial skills because the only way we talk to one another is through texts and social networking sites?

We came up with a list of pros and cons. Particularly in light of the recent election and crisis in Iran, we’ve had a chance to see new uses for sites like Facebook and Twitter. When international journalists were not allowed into Iran to cover the political situation, citizens in the country were able to communicate with the world via these sources.

This guerilla communication can put the power of information right in the hands of the people. Barack Obama won the 2008 presidential election thanks in part to community organizing through the internet. Texting and new websites give people opportunities to interact on new levels with people all over the world in an inexpensive way. As teens growing up in an Internet age, we have access to more information than any generation previous. In a sense, there is no part of the world off limits to us when we use these technologies.

On the flip side, such technologies can create problems. The issue of explicit messages being sent by cell phone, or “sexting” is disrupting many social conventions and creating an emotionally absent environment for an intimate practice. Sexting is removing the actual connection of sex. Technology can take people out of the present and place them in an alternative reality that removes them from real life.

Also, while it’s true that important political movements have been supported by the internet, the majority of the people using social sites or text messages are not. This isn’t necessarily a problem, but it can be. Think Kwame Kilpatrick. At this point in the development of technology, we haven’t decided as a society what the etiquette rules should be. Cell phone policies at high schools differ. Laws about cell phone use are unclear or nonexistent. In this way as well, we are never completely removed from these new technologies. They are forever around us, distracting us, and making it difficult to connect with people on an intimate level.

It’s our challenge to find a way to use technology in a positive way and detract from the negatives that come with the use of technology. As a teen activist group we want to use technology to bring people together; to facilitate change in a positive way. As the first generation to grow up with ipods, laptops, and Facebook, it’s our responsibility to define how to use them, when to use them, and create ways to make these technologies work for us.

This one hasn’t appeared in the zine yet, but might end up in the next issue. It’s an op-ed on the economy; enjoy!

As an eighteen-year-old, I am faced with a nebulous future after college and grad school. In fact, the only certainty is the tens of thousands of dollars of debt I will accumulate in the course of my education. Even with this education, I cannot be confident a job will be available for me when I leave school. My only consolation is that I have a few years for the job market to improve before venturing into it.

Still, our economic structure has sufficient holes to make me wary of my employment prospects no matter when I graduate. Without a major overhaul of our economic system, the United States is condemned to repeat a boom-and-bust cycle characterized by the dominance of the upper class and Wall Street.

In the corporate world, a lack of regulation leads to a short-term focus that sacrifices long-term economic health. Before the current crisis, a massive deregulation took place in the banking sector, allowing credit to flow far too freely.

The federal government deserves the blame for allowing this to happen. It began with Reagan, who passed his dangerous legacy of economic deregulation on to Clinton and both Bushes. All the while, Congress stood largely mute.

They now have an opportunity to compensate for their inaction, to remake the system. New regulation is needed, but the economy cannot be looked at in isolation. It is a product, the end result of the investments we choose to make in schools, green technology, infrastructure, healthcare, and more. These are the true fundamentals of our economy; without them, our nation will continue to decline.

Some would argue that massive spending in these areas is impossible, that we, the richest nation on earth, simply cannot afford to care for our citizens. The deficit is far too large as it currently stands, and greater efficiency and accountability in government spending can only do so much. Higher taxes are inevitable-but there are many who can afford to pay. With one of the lowest effective corporate tax rates in the industrialized world and an extremely wealthy upper class, the United States has vast reserves of untapped riches.

This wealth is currently not being put to the most effective possible use. Many Americans lack the resources to reach their full potential; if given the means to do so, they would be able to contribute far more to our nation than is currently the case.

The rich will attempt to protect their assets by claiming that they “worked” for that money, and some of them have. But is their work so much more valuable than that of the middle and lower classes, who put forth just as much effort and yet receive less? Eighty percent of the country controls less than twenty percent of our wealth; they deserve far better than what they have. If our economy is to become strong once more, this is where it must grow.

The world has changed; what once sufficed to keep our country strong no longer will. The modern American youth must have a college degree to enter the workforce, yet many of them must take on crushing amounts of debt to pay for their education. Our new working class will be much weaker with this anchor around our necks, ill-equipped to deal with the challenges we will face. By acting now, we can prevent this.

We have an opportunity to destroy the old model of corporate power, to grow a healthy and educated citizenry that would become the dominant workforce of the twenty-first century. I look at my generation and see apathy and desperation; we can see the system is broken-but I also see our vast potential.

A democracy is only as strong as its people; if the average American is well cared for and educated, then our nation will be far more resilient than before.

-Keagan Irrer

“You can end your life in ten minutes time. That quick…it can happen to the smartest person in the world,” said Bruce Godschalk, a recent exoneree from prison. Mr. Godschalk, like many others in America, was convicted of a crime he did not commit. In May of 1987, the 26 year old Mr. Godschalk was convicted of 2 counts of forcible rape, and 2 counts of burglary in Montgomery County, Pennsylvania. Sentenced to 11-22 years, Mr. Godschalk spent 15 years in jail for a crime he did not commit. He spent 7 more fighting with the prosecution for rights to the evidence that was sure to exonerate him of the crime, and was finally exonerated on February 14, 2002. How did this happen? How was an innocent young man jailed so quickly for such a terrible crime? Mr. Godschalk explained that it began with his own sister. The police were offering a $5,000 reward for capture of the suspect for the crimes. All Mr. Godschalk’s sister, a drug addict, saw was the money that she could use to buy drugs. For this reason, his sister falsely tipped off the police that her own brother was the wanted suspect. The police swooped down on the 26 year old Mr. Godschalk, and asked him to come to station and answer some questions. They told him that as soon as he answered them, he could go home. “I was put in a small room,” Mr. Godschalk narrated, “and that’s intimidating.” He was interrogated by the two police officers. The officers, wanting to close the case, fed Mr. Godschalk bits and bits of information about the crime, and kept telling him that as soon as he told them what they wanted to know, he could go home. “They basically told me, ‘you don’t need a lawyer’—hard to believe, huh?,” Mr. Godschalk said. He soon had enough information from the police officers to do what they wanted him to do all along: Mr. Godschalk made a false confession, thinking that he could then go home. Little did he know. The officers took him to court, he was quickly convicted on the basis of his false confession, and immediately jailed. In Mr. Godschalk’s words, jail was “lower than Hell.” After 15 years, however, Mr. Godschalk came across the Innocence Project. He learned that the Project was a non-profit, based out of Yeshiva University’s Cardozo School of Law, which worked to exonerate and free wrongly convicted prisoners based on DNA evidence. Like about a hundred others every month, Mr. Godschalk wrote to the Innocence Project, explaining his plight and asking for help. Even though the Project’s lawyers have about 180 cases, they accepted Mr. Godschalk’s, because they believed that there was, in fact, DNA evidence capable of exonerating him. It took 7 years to get rights to the evidence that would exonerate Mr. Godschalk, because the prosecution knew that the evidence did have the power to free Mr. Godschalk. However, when it was finally obtained, Mr. Godschalk was exonerated. He was now 48 years old. Of surviving those 22 years as a convict, Mr. Godschalk explained, “I’ll tell you what kept me motivated. It was love…for my family…faith, love. Did I lose hope? Yeah, I did…because of the confession. For a while, I really did lose hope.” Since 1989, there have been 223 post-conviction DNA exonerations in the United States. Added together, those 223 innocent convicts have spent over 2700 years in jail for crimes they did not commit.17 of those 223 served time on death row. The average age of the exonerees at conviction is 26. For 15 years, the Innocence Project has worked to pinpoint trends in reasons for wrongful conviction, and employed policy analysts who work to prevent more wrongful convictions. These analysts have found that 77% of the cases of wrongful conviction involved misidentification by eyewitnesses. Unreliable or fraudulent forensic evidence played a role in 65% of the 223 cases. False confessions played a role in 25% of these cases. The Innocence Project recommends legislation requiring interrogations to be recorded, to prevent such false confessions. “I’m strong…very strong. Up here,” Mr. Godschalk said. “They can take your body from you, but not your mind.” Mr. Godschalk lost what could have been the best years of his life. Between the ages of 26 and 48, many would have gotten a degree, gotten a job, and gotten married. Mr. Godschalk re-entered society itself at 48. When asked if he thought the United States justice system was corrupt, Mr. Godschalk answered “no.” When asked if he still harbored bitterness about his false conviction and years spent in prison, Mr.Godschalk replied, “no. If you do, it’ll just eat you up inside.” The Innocence Project continually works for people like Mr. Godschalk, who have had their lives taken away from them. For more information, contact www.innocenceproject.org, to help keep people like Mr. Godschalk able to say that the U.S. system is not corrupt, and to give people back their lives, and let them start again. Laura Hogikyan

Everyone knows that politicians lie and cheat their way to the top. “Playing politics” is an acceptable accuse for some decisions that politicians make. I myself have rationalized the actions of politicians by saying that if they didn’t “play politics,” they wouldn’t win. However, once you start “mudslinging” or running a negative campaign, you may be taking your politics too far. It is common these days to run a negative campaign; finding the fault of another candidate and showing them to the public is an important part of politics. In many cases this is an appropriate form of campaigning, but when do we know when we have taken it too far?
Negative campaigning has existed almost as long as politics, but it really came to light in Lyndon B. Johnson’s presidential campaigning in the form of a commercial implying that his opponent, Barry Goldwater, would start nuclear war. Another notable ad was the Willie Horton ad used by George H. W. Bush in his campaign against Micheal Dukakis in 1988. This ad implied that Dukakis was soft on crime because he supposedly let a known rapist have weekend passes from jail, which turned out to be false. With new technological developments, politicians were able to make “robocalls” which are where a voice recording calls your home and asks if you would vote for candidate X if they did X. For example, you may get a call that asks you if you would vote for said candidate if they beat their wife. The candidate may or may not beat their wife, and they didn’t say that they did, they just implied it. An notable example happened in the 2000 republican primaries when George W. Bush used robocalls against John McCain, causing him to lose South Carolina. These robocalls asked “would you vote for John McCain if you knew he had an illegitimate black child?” McCain’s wife had adopted a little girl from Bangladesh and using these images of the family, George W. Bush twisted the truth to try to win the nomination. After McCain’s loss, McCain swore he would never use robocalls in any of his campaigns. However, in the 2008 campaign against Barack Obama, McCain used robocalls to further tie the democratic candidate with William Ayers, a “terrorist” with whom Obama had no connection.
What was shown to us in this last election is that people aren’t buying the negative campaign ads anymore. Everyone should be thankful that the American population is smart enough now to see through ads like these. Hopefully this will be the start of a new age of politics; honest and upstanding!

Well, I can dream!

It’s the theme for the next issue. It doesn’t have to be a bad thing-though we will likely have a few articles on global warming, nuclear proliferation, etc. We’ll also do articles on how the world could change drastically for the better. As usual, send any submissions to armistice.zine@gmail.com or 120 1/2 W. Liberty, Ann Arbor, Michigan 48104.
We will, of course, look at submissions that aren’t on the theme, but it will improve your chances of acceptance if your submission does coincide with the theme.

We were on WCBN on Sunday from eleven to twelve. Sorry I didn’t post about it before it happened, but we’ll be on the air again. I’m not sure exactly when, but when I find out I’ll tell you about it.

At Cafe Ambrosia, 326 Maynard, from 7:30-10:30 p.m.-but feel free to stop by anytime.

See the importance of Iraq and what originated in Iraq that we still use today!

There will be chessboards open for competitors and an art display submitted by local youth expressing their perspectives of peace as it relates to connections between Ann Arbor and Ypsilanti.

Michigan Peaceworks intern Zaineb Al-Kalby will present a brief history of Iraq with some Iraqi snacks to go with it. So come join us to play chess and take a little bite into Iraq!

Sorry I haven’t been updating much over the past week. We’re pretty busy with the anniversary of the Iraq war coming up on March 21st; we’ve got a protest going on outside the Michigan Union at 1:00 p.m.

The new issue has just come in. If you want a copy, you can pick one up at 120 1/2 West Liberty, Ann Arbor, Michigan-or you can send us a request for one at armistice.zine@gmail.com and we will mail you a copy. I will also be posting portions of the zine on this blog, which I will try to update every Tuesday and Thursday from now on.

It will be going to the printer’s shortly, so we should have it within the next couple of weeks. But if you can’t wait, here’s a sample:

Reaganism