NEWSBYANTONY ADOLF

Usually understood as a time to express gratitude for the people and things we sometimes take for granted, Thanksgiving and this year's holiday season can also have a different meaning.

George W. Bush, the now former president we still and should love to berate, is on tour to promote his new book, and one peace activist organization is making a point of un-thanking him for it wherever he goes.

CODEPINK: Women for Peace (men welcome, too) and their supporters are mobilizing around the country to protest against Bush's self-glorifications of torture and warmongering in his memoir Decision Points.

It's a must-read if you want to know how to get away with and justify horrifications such as waterboarding and starting the two longest wars in US history.

"With his book, media appearances and the opening of his library in Dallas, George Bush is being treated as a respected statesman instead of what he really is: a war criminal," said CODEPINK cofounder Medea Benjamin. "That's why we, the people, have to set the record straight."

CODEPINK's nonviolent actions have included the usual in-person protests, 'setting the record straight' in Milwaukee, Miami and elsewhere. Why not your hometown, too?

But CODEPINK has creatively gone well beyond protests, with a number of inventive and easy ways to un-thank Bush at a bookstores near you, such as printing out special bookmarks that read "Warning: This Book's Author is a War Criminal" and placing them in each copy of Decision Points, or gathering copies of the Bush memoir and moving them to the crime section of the bookstore. Check some visual examples here, and if you go ahead with some book-moving in your local bookstore, consider emailing a photo of your 'work' to the CODEPINK's "Where's W's Book Belong?" contest.

There is no shortage of skeptics about peace prospects in Afghanistan, despite the significant progress over the past few months

To understand why the skeptics are drowning out the protagonists of peace in public debate, let's first go over the views of three prominent groups of Afghan peace cynics, and the reasons behind their doubts.

The first is represented by Michael Semple. A former UN and European envoy with a history of contacts with the Taliban, currently lecturing at Harvard University's Carr Center for Human Rights Policy, Semple recently gave an interview to The Guardian: "It's traditional for people on either side [in Afghanistan] to develop linkages. The enemy go to the other side and make tactical requests. It's not just money but also requests for brothers and cousins to be let out of jail. Its a case of: give me a few bob and free my cousin."

"We know this kind of thing has been going on for a long time," Semple continues, "That is the way Karzai operates, but it's also standard operating procedure for Afghanistan... If this were a serious process they would be guarding its confidentiality for dear life."

The first and highly controversial conviction of a Guantanamo prison detainee under President Obama's watch occurred today, with Canadian Omar Khadr's confession at the U.S. naval base in Cuba.

The strange outcome of this extended ordeal has created a human rights and international law conundrum that is likely to lead to more confusion when it comes to bringing terrorists and militants to justice. Few single events bring together so many of our gravest concerns.

There is much to do, and your actions on this trial matter now because it is setting a precedent for the future.

Here are just four of the many troubling issues the trial has raised.

An international "Contact Group" of dozens of countries and global organizations has been created to support the shift from an Afghan war strategy to an Afghan peace strategy.

As previously reported on Change.org, this momentous event in the progress of peace in Afghanistan has already been diligently underway for months, but has left observers very confused.

No one is clear about what a "Contact Group" actually is or does, but among its members are United Nations, the European Union member-states and NATO. Having more countries and their resources invested in the peace process will hopefully help it along, but too many cooks in the kitchen can also become a hindrance.

There are a couple of surprise invitees in the group. One is the Organisation of Islamic Conference (OIC), which rarely makes the Western press despite representing more than 50 nations and promoting Muslim solidarity worldwide. The OIC wasn't present at the first Contact Group meeting held in Rome last week.

The second invitee, however, was. That country is Iran.

It is one of the great ironies in the history of American domestic politics and foreign policy: the champion of the START (Strategic Arms Reduction) Treaty, which heralded the formal nuclear disarmament process between the US and the USSR, was none other than Republican President Ronald Reagan.

By the time the START Treaty was implemented late in 2001, over 80 percent of the nuclear weapons that existed when it was signed were eliminated. It remains the largest disarmament treaty ever put into effect, and for this reason alone Reagan deserves a special place in the history of peace, regardless of what his detractors or devotees think of him and his self-titled ideology. Recognizing and continuing the decades of work of anti-nuclear activists in the U.S. and abroad, without whose vigilance and pressure START wouldn't have been initiated, is also in order.

But we cannot give the same praise to Reagan's presidential or political party successors, and if nothing is done soon the world is likely to witness the end of the START Treaty - the single greatest instrument of nuclear disarmament in the world - and with it a golden opportunity to reduce the country's balloooning national deficit and high-strung international tensions.

First the Koran-burning scandal shook already dangerously volatile global Muslim/non-Muslim relations, leading to U.N. consideration of an international approach to curbing Islamophobia.

Now, some radicals in the American Tea Party movement are starting to build ties with even more radical anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim groups in the U.K. and their continental European counterparts, creating a transnational hate movement symptomatic of our polarized times.

The British English Defence Leaugue (EDL), whose members literally wear painted masks reminiscent of the Friday the 13th horror flicks, are vehemently against what they see as the "Islamification" of Europe, a paranoia akin to some of the punditry on the U.S.-based Fox News.

But do not mistake this for a Halloween gag. EDL radicals are serious, so serious in fact that that in a broad effort to build transnational ties their leaders have reached out to others in continental Europe, notably to globally infamous Dutch anti-Islam leaders; to Pamela Geller, a prominent U.S. activist who leads Stop Islamization of America; and to Rabbi Nachum Shifren, a Tea Party speaker and candidate for the California legislature. They have also reached out to domestic Jewish, Christian, Hindu and Sikh sympathizers. "It's a grass roots social movement," says Guramit Singh, an EDL spokesman.

Obama's people call it "going dark."

As the Internet's primacy over telephones as the world's preferred communications platform continues to grow, U.S. anti-terrorism officials face an increasingly hard time intercepting communications. So much so that the Obama administration, in conjunction with the major intelligence and law enforcement agencies, is preparing a sweeping overhaul of regulations controlling how the U.S. government can access online information and what it can do with it.

Lawfully monitoring suspected terrorists with judicial authorization and intervening when there is just cause to do so is one thing. But it's wholly another to be able to wiretap the Internet as a whole, putting the Constitutionally-protected privacy of citizens and residents at risk in the name of catching a few fish in a huge net with gaping holes.

It's not the soft sweater material, or the legendary song by Led Zeppelin. It's the ticking time bomb region between India, China and Pakistan that is on the verge of exploding into war, bringing three nuclear powers (and perhaps four) into conflict.

The clock has been running down for over half a century, with no one doing nearly enough either to alleviate the suffering of the region's residents or prevent World War III from starting in Kashmir. And the situation just recently got worse, raising alarms in security circles globally. Please also consider discussing this at dinner, as well as with your Congressional representatives.

"Leaders from every major Indian political party flew to Srinagar [the capital of Kashmir's India-administered territory]... to demonstrate India's seriousness about resolving the political crisis that has seen months of protests bloodily suppressed in Kashmir," Time Magazine reported two weeks ago. The result? None.

Over 100 people have died since June, as predominantly Muslim protesters who want independence or Pakistani administration clashed with Indian security forces, again and again. This is only the latest manifestation of an unresolved, underlying problem that's decades old. With new U.S. incursions into Pakistan, and a Kashmir border with Afghanistan, the region's ongoing conflict is now only one step removed from a clash of four nuclear powers.

It has taken a deadly decade that has cost taxpayers a half-trillion dollars, but the tide is finally turning toward peace in Afghanistan for everyone involved, including the U.S., NATO, Afghans and the Taliban. Here's the untold story of the progress of peace in Afghanistan, and a powerful way you can be part of it.

Over the past few months, as mainstream media has been reporting on the military offensive and its casualties, I have been reporting on a parallel and equally important offensive and its affirmation of prosperity on Change.org that has been kept in the shadows until now: the peace efforts by Afghan and UN officials, as well as citizen diplomats, with the Taliban and other militants. They are beginning to bear fruit and, at last, receiving the attention they deserve. Amazingly, the U.S. and NATO suddenly appear open to these peace efforts as well, all of which points to the power of peace work and peace journalism as transformative global forces.

Today, former Afghan President and leader of the recently established Peace Council, Burhanuddin Rabbani, announced that the Taliban "have some conditions to start the negotiations process. It gives us hope that they want to talk and negotiate. We are taking our first steps … I believe there are people among the Taliban that have a message that they want to talk. They are ready."

Earlier this year, U.N. Counter-Terrorism Chief Richard Barrett, in my Change.org interview with him, said that the only solution to the Afghanistan war was a political one. His almost blasphemous prediction then is coming true as you read this.

When a language dies, a unique way of understanding ourselves as humans, the world and the universe dies with it. In the last 500 years, half of the world's languages have become extinct. What's new is the accelerated rate of language extinction today: linguists predict that, in the next 100 years, nearly 90 percent of the world's 7,000 languages will become extinct.

Like species, languages have evolved over millennia and embody irreplaceable living knowledge and cognitive abilities that, once gone, never return.  Who's to blame and what can be done about this tragedy? Are not language rights also human rights that deserve equal protection?

These languages, like their species correlates, have come to be called "endangered." In a historical sociolinguistic study examining the roles of multilingualism and immigration in U.S. public policy, I coined the term "logocide" (from the Greek word, logos, meaning speech) to described the active measures governments and non-governmental agents, like religious organizations and businesses, have taken to suppress languages, purposefully leading to their extinction.

In the case of North America, logocide primarily refers to Native American languages, which once numbered in the vibrant hundreds and now have dwindled to a few disparate dozens, with the imposed primacy of English even over other European languages that were already in use. How the "Spanish Question" is being addressed today cannot be understood outside this wider historical context, which also has pressing parallels worldwide.