Urgent Actions from CREDO Action
by Danny Fisher
Two urgent actions today from CREDO Action. The first concerns the situation in Tibet, and asks you to urge your U.S. Congressional representative to speak up about the situation. Specifically, the form letter requests that your representative support Tibet in three ways:
- The U.S. should speak out forcefully against China’s brutal crackdown in Tibet.
- The U.S. government should strongly support the Dalai Lama’s call for a United Nations team of investigators to go to Tibet as soon as possible.
- The U.S. should do everything in its capacity to urge China to withdraw military and security forces, release those detained, and allow peaceful protest. China must halt house-to-house searches; and authorities must refrain from any further arrests of Tibetan protesters even after its so-called surrender deadline has passed on Monday at midnight. China must immediately allow foreign journalists back into all Tibetan areas (Tibetan Autonomous Region as well as the Tibetan areas of Gansu, Qinghai and Sichuan).
If you are a U.S. citizen, contact your representative here.
The second action has to do with ending the U.S. military’s “stop-loss” policy.
- For the past several years, the military has been using its stop-loss policy as a backdoor draft. This policy involuntarily extends service members’ enlistment contracts, thereby preventing them from leaving the military — or coming home from Iraq or Afghanistan — after their term of enlistment has ended.
This policy is devastating to our soldiers’ mental health, to their morale, and to their families. Some are forced to stay overseas for much longer than they had originally signed up for, while others are being sent back to a war zone after having returned to civilian life. This stop-loss policy is not in keeping with the concept of an all-volunteer military.
As Senator John Kerry noted in 2004, “People serving beyond the time of their voluntary service are no longer volunteers.” Our military men and women are bravely serving their country — many of them despite objections to the war to which they have been deployed — and their service contracts should be honored. They deserve to come home to their families and attempt to rebuild their lives without the fear of being sent back into harm’s way.
Sign the petition urging U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates to end the military’s stop-loss policy here.
