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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: JakeStraw who wrote (280123)	3/15/2006 4:37:42 PM
From: tejek	Respond to of 1573135

California students nurture anti-war role By JOE GAROFOLI San Francisco Chronicle 15-MAR-06 Turning up on a Pentagon surveillance list has become a badge of honor for members of a student anti-war organization at the University of California-Santa Cruz _ and made them a national face of the peace movement. "We're not paranoid about it, and in a way, it's given us an opportunity to talk about the war to different people, to tell people that it was not OK to invade Iraq," said Kai Sawyer, 23, a member of Students Against War and a teaching assistant in the psychology department. "Berkeley may have the reputation for having a lot of anti-war activists, but I feel like Santa Cruz has had a lot more going on." Students Against War brought the attention of both the left and the Pentagon to the hilly, redwood-studded campus through counter-recruiting _ a tactic of directly taking on military recruiting that has become the leading edge of the anti-war movement. Counter-recruiting can take the form of demanding that a high school ask parents' permission before letting military recruiters contact their children. Or it can be a "queer kiss-in" in front of military recruiters, something UC Santa Cruz activists did at a campus job fair in October to protest the military's ban on openly gay service members. "Talking about a war on the other side of the world can get kind of abstract for some students," said Kristin Anderson, a San Francisco State University senior and board member of the nationwide Campus Anti-War Network. The Santa Cruz anti-war group is the network's largest on the West Coast. "(Counter-recruitment) has gotten popular because it gives students something concrete they can do," Anderson said. "They see a recruiter trying to get their friend to join, and there's a chance that their friend might not come back. And if he does, he definitely won't be the same." It was an April 5 counter-recruiting demonstration at Santa Cruz that led to Students Against War's national notoriety. About a dozen protesters entered a career fair in a campus building and surrounded a table where military recruiters sat, preventing other students from talking with them. More than 300 people demonstrated outside. In the jostling that ensued, a career-center staffer was slightly injured. The recruiters left; some found their tires slashed when they returned to their cars. No one has been cited in connection with the vandalism. In December, MSNBC reported that the incident and a separate protest by a UC Berkeley group had turned up on a Defense Department database of potential threats against U.S. military facilities and personnel. The Santa Cruz incident was listed as a credible threat, while the Berkeley one was not. Since the story broke, the American Civil Liberties Union, California's two U.S. senators and UC Santa Cruz's chancellor have demanded that the Pentagon explain how the students landed on the list and what the military is doing with the information. The Pentagon has offered few answers. Earlier this month, the ACLU filed a federal lawsuit against the Defense Department, hoping to force the Pentagon to release any information it has gathered on the Santa Cruz and Berkeley groups. shns.com