King's Prophetic Call for Peace

King's Prophetic Call for Peace
Eric Stoner
April 05, 2007

Eric Stoner is a writer based in New York, who has written for numerous publications, including The Nation and the Peoria Journal Star. he can be reached at ericstoner1@gmail.com.

Forty years ago this week, on April 4, 1967, and a year to the day before his tragic assassination, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. rose to the pulpit of New York's Riverside Church to deliver one of the most controversial speeches of his life.

Entitled " Beyond Vietnam," the address was King's first public antiwar speech, and he gave it only after much trepidation and prayer. Believing that silence in the face of injustice is in fact complicity with evil, King wrote in his autobiography that, "The time had come—indeed it was past due—when I had to disavow and dissociate myself from those who in the name of peace burn, maim and kill."
http://www.tompaine.com/articles/2007/04/05/kings_prophetic_call_for_peace.php

ABC: U.S. Engaged in Secret War With Iran

ABC: U.S. Engaged in Secret War With Iran
ABC News is reporting the U.S. is engaged in a secret war with Iran. Since 2005, U.S. officials have been advising a Pakistani tribal militant group with ties to the Taliban on how to carry out deadly guerilla raids inside Iran. The Pakistani group – called Jundullah -- has taken responsibility for the deaths and kidnappings of more than a dozen Iranian soldiers and officials. Most recently, Jundullah took credit for a bus bombing that killed at least 11 members of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard in February. Officials say the U.S. relationship with Jundullah is arranged so that the U.S. provides no funding to the group, which would require an official presidential order or "finding" as well as congressional oversight. Some former CIA officers say the arrangement is reminiscent of how the U.S. government used proxy armies to destabilize the government of Nicaragua in the 1980s.

http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=07/04/04/1343204

http://blogs.abcnews.com/theblotter/2007/04/abc_news_exclus.html

The botched US raid that led to the hostage crisis

How a bid to kidnap Iranian security officials sparked a diplomatic crisis
Tuesday, April 03, 2007

By Patrick Cockburn

A failed American attempt to abduct two senior Iranian security officers on an official visit to northern Iraq was the starting pistol for a crisis that 10 weeks later led to Iranians seizing 15 British sailors and Marines.

Early on the morning of 11 January, helicopter-born US forces launched a surprise raid on a long-established Iranian liaison office in the city of Arbil in Iraqi Kurdistan. They captured five relatively junior Iranian officials whom the US accuses of being intelligence agents and still holds.

In reality the US attack had a far more ambitious objective, The Independent has learned. The aim of the raid, launched without informing the Kurdish authorities, was to seize two men at the very heart of the Iranian security establishment.

Full story at:
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/article2414760.ece