PRESENTERS  Aidan Delgado served in Iraq from April 2003 to April 2004 where he was deployed as an Army Reserve Specialist in Nasiriyah and Abu Ghraib. Soon after his arrival in Iraq, he sought conscientious objector status and turned in his weapon. At Abu Ghraib, he witnessed U.S. soldiers abuse and kill Iraqi detainees. After serving his full tour of duty, Aidan Delgado was finally granted conscientious objector status and was honorably discharged. He offers a first person account of the horrors of war, illustrated with photos he took while serving in Iraq. Aidan Delgado is a member of Iraq Veterans Against the War. * * * * *  Aimee Allison earned an honorable discharge as a Conscientious Objector during the Persian Gulf War, after serving 4 years as a combat medic in the Army Reserves. Today, she supports soldiers applying for CO discharges and writes and speaks about the experience and role of GI resistance in ending the war. She is a leader in the counter-recruitment movement, serving on the steering committee of San Francisco's College Not Combat Initiative and the National Network Opposing the Militarization of Youth to restrict recruiters from public school campuses through education, direct action, and legislation. In addition, she makes frequent presentations to youth and their families about alternatives to military service for education and job opportunities, most recently to immigrant communities. She recently ran for Oakland City Council to bring progressive peace and justice values to local governance priorities. * * * * *  Arlene Inouye is coordinator and founder of Coalition Against Militarism in our Schools, CAMS, which has grown beyond her expectation. She is a bilingual Speech and Language Specialist in East Los Angeles with a caseload of 100 students from ages 3 to 22 years. She is on the Steering Committee of the National Network Opposed the the Militarization of Youth and on the Human Rights Committee, United Teachers of Los Angeles. Arlene lives in a blended family,and spends free moments working on her second degree black belt in karate. * * * * * Isabel G, Program Coordinator of Just Think’s Family Media Forum, has worked with Bay Area schools and community organizations over the last eight years to implement and coordinate various cultural health, vocational and digital arts programs for youth. Isabel’s experience in video production includes several independent and educational projects including a recent promotional documentary about the East Oakland Boxing Association/Smart Moves. She uses a media literacy perspective to critique military recruiting materials aimed at youth and parents. * * * * *  Cesar A. Cruz is an internationally renowned poet, educator and human rights activist. From marching 76 straight miles to hunger striking for 16 days, Mr. Cruz has dedicated his life to fighting injustice. His relentless drive and passion has touched the lives of many, and his writings have received praise from activists and scholars throughout the world. He is executive director of The Avenues Project, a visionary non-profit serving high school aged youth in East Oakland. He will expose the military’s use of hip hop and video games to recruit young people. * * * * *  Company of Prophets From the depths of OaklandÕs underground, Company of Prophets brings 5th dimensional tag-team rhyme schemes and unparalleled turntablism to Hip-HopÕs fragile surface. Company of Prophets first came to international attention in 1999, leading protest with song at the WTO protests in Seattle. From 2000-2002 the crew established themselves as one of the Bay AreaÕs premiere Hip-Hop bands with their monthly showcase of urban culture and politics, Collective Soul. Folks fortunate enough to experience Company of ProphetsÕ tenure with the extravaganza witnessed emcees Brutha Los and Rashidi Omari, and DJ Treatunice rock capacity crowds with a mind-blowing combination of written and improvised work. * * * * *  Danielle Schnur and Rico Chenyek, both juniors at Berkeley High School, together with other members of the Social Action Committee of the Communication Arts and Sciences School, they organized a day-long Teach In which reached over 2000 students with information about the war in Iraq, military recruiting, the draft and conscientious objection. They will describe how they pulled together an amazing panel of speakers which included veterans, conscientious objectors, a draft resistance organizer and a military recruiter, how they mobilized teachers and students to participate in the event, and how they handled extensive media coverage that day. * * * * *  David Waters served in Army Special Forces in Vietnam, and later worked in various positions within law enforcement and the prisons in his home state of Alabama. Over time he came to reject the racism and violence of the systems in which he had worked, and created a different life for himself and his son. He will talk about how becoming a conscientious objector led him to refuse to continue to pay taxes for killing and war. * * * * *  Edward Hasbrouck is one of 20 people in the USA prosecuted and imprisoned for draft resistance since the reinstatement of draft registration in 1980. He was an editor of Resistance News and an organizer with the National Resistance Committee in the 1980's and 1990's, and he worked with the organizers of the Health Workers Pledge Against Militarism and the Draft during the first USA-Iraq war in 1989-1990. He is the creator of the current ÒResisters.info" and "MedicalDraft.info" Web sites. * * * * *  Elizabeth Wrigley-Field is a member of the Campus Antiwar Network at NYU. Last spring, she helped organize a CAN protest that successfully prevented a CIA recruiting event from taking place at her school. More recently, she traveled to New Orleans as part of CAN's Relief Not War caravan from New York, which distributed thousands of dollars of relief directly to Louisiana residents who had been abandoned by FEMA. She writes frequently on counter-recruitment. * * * * *  Fernando Suarez del Solar lost his son Jesus, a US Marine, in 2003 when he stepped on a US cluster bomb while fighting in Iraq. Since then, Fernando has been a powerful voice against the invasion and occupation of Iraq. A member of Gold Star Families for Peace and Military Families Speak Out, he traveled to Iraq with a Global Exchange delegation in 2003 to listen to the needs of the Iraqi people. "Mr. Suarez himself is a new kind of American hero," says UC San Diego professor Jorge Mariscal. "He considers himself an ordinary citizen compelled to expose—without bitterness—the lies and injustices perpetrated by the Bush administration in its war in Iraq. His most immediate goals are to assist immigrant families who have children returning from war and to educate Latino youth about how they can create a better world." Fernando founded his own counterrecruitment organization, Proyecto Guerrero Azteca. * * * * * Jeremy Tully is a campaign coordinator for College Not Combat (Proposition I in San Francisco). He has been involved in antiwar and Palestine solidarity organizing for the past three years, and is also a member of the International Socialist Organization. * * * * *  Joshua Casteel enlisted in the US Army Reserves in the Delayed Entry Program in 1997 while a Junior in high school. Years later, after attending the military's premier language-training school to learn Arabic, he was assigned to be a translator and interrogator at Abu Ghraib in the summer of 2004, after the abuse scandal had broken publicly. His experiences in Iraq convinced him that, as a Christian, he could not participate in war, he applied for conscientious objector status that December, receiving an Honorable Discharge from the US Army the following May. He currently is attending the University of Iowa's Playwrights' Workshop. * * * * *  Jorge Mariscal Jorge Mariscal has been a member of Project YANO since 1991. He is a veteran of the US war in Viet Nam and Professor of Spanish and Chicano Literature at the University of California, San Diego. He has written extensively on the role of Latinos and Latinas in the US military and published the only anthology of Chicano/a writings on the Viet Nam War (Aztlan and Viet Nam, UCal Press, 1999). His latest book is a study of the Chicano Movement (Brown-Eyed Children of the Sun, UTexas Press, 2005). Working with Project YANO, he has been at the forefront of educating Latino communities about the realities of military recruiting. A recent article in The Nation stated: "Mariscal [is] considered by many to be the dean of Latino counterrecruitment efforts." Mariscal believes that in coming decades ground-zero for military recruiting will be Latino and immigrant communities. "Those who have come to counterrecruitment as a strategy to stop the war in Iraq," he has written, "need to understand that the counterrecruitment movement will have to continue long after Iraq if we hope to stop future unnecessary wars of aggression." * * * * *  Judith Ross has been speaking out against the war for nearly three years with Military Families Speak Out. Her son was recruited into the Marines during his senior year in high school, just prior Bush's 2001 occupation of the white house. A member of the class of 1968 at Berkeley, she was arrested recently at the white house in civil disobedience with other military families. * * * * * June Brumer coordinates counter recruitment presentations for Oakland high school classrooms with Alternatives to War Through Education, a project of the Central Committee for Conscientious Objectors. These presentations are offered by veteran/educator teams at the invitation of classroom teachers who want to ensure that their students are getting both sides of the military recruiting story. Over the last year AWE has reached dozens of classrooms in every major Oakland public high school. June will present both the organizing model and the counter recruitment curriculum that AWE has developed. * * * * *  Kevin Ramirez has been coordinator of the Military Out of Our Schools program of CCCO for the past five years, where he also edits AWOL Magazine. He has conducted countless workshops, trainings and speaking events covering a wide range of topics from draft registration and resistance, to conscientious objection and counter-recruitment. He has traveled extensively around the United States providing communities with the information and strategies to counter military recruitment in their schools. Kevin has also traveled extensively throughout the world and has personally witnessed the direct connections between military recruitment in the US, the world's most powerful military being the US, and the legacy of warfare and colonialsim that is left in the wake of US foreign policy and it's puppet democracies. * * * * *  Laurie and Russell Loving Laurie Loving's son was born under a maple tree. At age 18 he met his first recruiter at his alternative high-school. Eighteen months later he was on his way to boot camp. Laurie's now 21 year-old son deployed to Iraq August 16th and his family's nightmare has begun. His unit suffered 13 troops seriously wounded their first week out. Laurie and her husband Russell Loving recently started the Military Families Speak Out (MFSO) Capital Region chapter in central California. MFSO's message is three-fold: Support the Troops, Bring Them Home Now, and Take Care of Them When They Get Here. Laurie has a master's degree in Social Work and has had a career working and volunteering with non-profits in the areas of disabilities, food cooperatives, peace and justice, and women's issues. Russell is a Vietnam-era veteran and is a criminal and civil defense attorney. Both Laurie and Russell are also massage practitioners, mediators and currently work at UC Davis Martin Luther King School of Law * * * * * Marylin Saner is a member of MFSO and mother of three sons. One is currently serving in the Army and is in Iraq. He was recently home for two weeks leave and returned to Iraq the end of September. Marylin's second son is 19 and a student at City College in SF and her third son is a high school senior. The two younger sons are constantly being recruited at school, and recently, "the Navy almost got my second son, but at the last minute Greg said he wasn't going to join." * * * * *  Maryam Roberts gives presentations that educate young people about their rights when they sign up with the military in a time of war, military recruiter strategies, and linking militarization of youth globally and locally. She also works on counter-recruitment efforts that combine the voices of students, teachers, parents, military families, Iraq war veterans and organizations to educate young people about alternatives to the military. She is a Co-Founder of Art in Action, which combines art, activism and community building for young folks, and has organized and facilitated many youth leadership programs. She is also an organizer with the Military Out of Our Schools Bay Area coalition. * * * * * Max Ventura is a mother of three children approaching potential draft age, a member of the Radical Family Collective, and a direct action organizer. She was active in draft resistance work in the 1980's, and has been working to mobilize and organize parents and families to support and join with their children in resistance to any new draft. * * * * *  Pablo Paredes On December 6, 2004, Navy petty officer Pablo Paredes refused his assignment to board the Iraq-bound ship USS Bonhomme Richard in a bold statement against the illegal war in Iraq. Convicted for missing movement, Pablo was sentenced to two months restriction, three months hard labor without confinement, and reduction in rank to E-1, and he currently awaits the approval of his request for conscientious objector status. Pablo, along with his brother and most avid advocate Victor Paredes, continues to speak out against the war which he feels is illegal and immoral. * * * * *  Peter Camejo has fought for social and environmental justice since his teens. He marched in Selma, Alabama with Martin Luther King, was active against the war in Vietnam and has been a long-time supporter of the women's movement and gay and lesbian rights. He was the Green Party candidate in the 2002 California gubernatorial election, as well as the running mate of independent candidate Ralph Nader in the 2004 presidential election. * * * * *  Rick Jahnkow has been a full-time counter-militarism organizer based in San Diego County since 1982. He is a consultant to two organizations, the Project on Youth and Non-Military Opportunities (Project YANO) and Committee Opposed to Militarism and the Draft (COMD), and serves on advisory boards for the American Friends Service Committee and National Network Opposing the Militarization of Youth (NNOMY). In his activities with Project YANO and COMD, Rick directs outreach to high schools and has worked as a non-attorney on two court cases seeking equal access to high schools. * * * * *  Ruby Butler, a junior at the Youth Empowerment School in East Oakland, worked as a summer intern with the Central Committee for Conscientious Objectors. Together with a team of Youth Educators and Veterans, she offered counter recruitment presentations to youth groups, and participated in press conferences and actions to expose the false advertising used by military recruiters. * * * * *  Tahan Jones, an Oakland native, applied for CO status from within the military at the beginning of the Gulf War in 1990. When he refused to be shipped to Iraq, he was charged with desertion in times of war, and faced the death penalty until these charges were dropped because war was never officially declared! Tahan has spoken out against war in many Bay Area high school classrooms where he is a regular presenter with Alternatives to War through Education/CCCO. * * * * * Zeina Zaatari, born and raised in South Lebanon, earned her PhD in Cultural Anthropology with an emphasis in Feminist Theory from the University of California at Davis. Zeina conducted fieldwork with women's groups and women activists in South Lebanon detailing their life histories and the ways they negotiated their work in civil society of a post-war country. Zeina currently works as a Program Officer for the Middle East and North Africa at the Global Fund for Women in San Francisco. Prior to that, she had been teaching courses on women of the Arab and Muslim worlds, on gender and sexuality as well as religion and society. She has delivered several presentations on women and war, Arab women's movements and Arab American feminists, and has recently authored a report on women's freedom in Lebanon and an essay on Arab American Feminists and community activism and organizing. Zeina is a founding member of the Radical Arab Women's Activist Network and the National Council of Arab Americans. She also serves as the coordinator of the Defense of Civil Rights in Academia (DCRA), a project of the NCA. Zeina has also served on the Transnational Task Force of INCITE: Women of Color against Violence's Anti-Militarism Campaign. * * * * *  Zamill Bonner is a poet who attends the Youth Empowerment School in East Oakland. She learned about counter recrutment while working at the Central Committee for Conscientious Objectors. She will perform a spoken word piece which she wrote specifically for this conference.
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