Contact Governor Henry on behalf of Hung Thanh Le
From ACLU-OK:

We are pleading with you to contact Governor Henry

The Governor has the power to reconsider his denial of clemency for Mr. Le and stop the execution. The A.G.'s office requested a Feb. 10th execution date but it has not been set yet.

TIME IF VERY IMPORTANT --TO TRY TO SAVE MR. LE'S LIFE
Governor Henry's Pardon and Parole Board recommended by a vote of 4-0 (Patrick Morgan did not vote) for the Governor to GRANT CLEMENCY and give Mr. Le life in prison. Three of the five members of the Pardon and Parole Board are appointees of
Governor Henry. All three of the Governor's appointees voted for clemency.
_____

Emergency Actions to take

*Contact members of the Pardon and Parole Board and thank them for their NO
vote and ask them to plead with the governor to grant clemency. There is NOTHING improper or illegal about this.

*Write letters to the editor, quickly

*Call in to radio shows, to the media, ask questions as to WHY the Governor
isn't following his own Pardon and Parole Board's recommendations. Ask the media to ASK the Governor these questions.

*If you know donors to Governor Henry's campaign, ask them to call the
Governor on behalf of Mr. Le

*Take part in upcoming marches and protests on Mr. Le's behalf (action alerts will be forth-coming) If you have questions about this, contact OCADP, ACLU or Amnesty Intl. of Oklahoma.

*CALL OR FAX THE GOVERNOR'S OFFICE AND ASK HIM TO PLEASE RECONSIDER

*Talk to anyone you know in the Vietnamese Community in your area. Ask them
to join with the large number of Vietnamese-Americans who came to our meeting today. We have contact information for them. They are planning to make every attempt to meet with the governor and plan marches and actions on their own.

*Talk to those you know who suffer from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder or
people who work with those who suffer from PTSD. Ask them to call the Governor on Mr. Le's behalf.

The Governor's Contact information:
State Capitol Building
2300 N. Lincoln Blvd., Room 212
Oklahoma City, OK 73105
Telephone 405-521-2342
FAX 405-521-3353

Joann Bell, Executive Director, ACLU-Ok.

 
Stop Oklahoma "Defense of Marriage" bill
STOP the passage of SJR 38 anti-GLBT legislation that has just been introduced
Take Action Now.

Senate Republican Floor Leader James A. Williamson, R-Tulsa, introduced legislation, SJR 38, to send a “defense of marriage” constitutional amendment to a vote of the people. Williamson’s constitutional amendment would define marriage as “the union of one man and one woman,” and would prohibit the state from recognizing same-gender marriages performed in other states. The amendment also states, “Neither this Constitution nor any other provision of law shall be construed to require that marital status or the legal incidents thereof be conferred upon unmarried couples or groups.”

Take Action Now! Tell your senator the you will not stand for this type of divisive, mean-spirited law that were designed to single out and marginalize an entire group of Oklahomans for unequal treatment." I ask you to tell your senator we will not marginalize any Oklahoman by voting no on SJR 38.

http://capwiz.com/federationlgbt/issues/alert/?alertid=4897001&type=ST

 
Save Overtime Pay
From AFL-CIO:
President Bush is about to finalize changes in the laws governing overtime pay that could take away overtime protections from at least 8 million people. His changes will cut paychecks for families, erode the 40-hour workweek and encourage employers to require more overtime work. The changes include a new "military penalty" that would allow employers to use military training as the basis for cutting overtime pay.

Please sign the online petition opposing President Bush's overtime pay take-away.

 
Censure Bush for misleading us
From MoveOn.org:

During the buildup to war, President Bush said the United States "must not ignore the threat gathering against us. Facing clear evidence of peril, we cannot wait for the final proof -- the smoking gun -- that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud.... We have every reason to assume the worst, and we have an urgent duty to prevent the worst from occurring." [1]

On the eve of sending troops into battle, Bush asserted that "Intelligence gathered by this and other governments leaves no doubt that the Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised." [2]

Now David Kay, the CIA’s chief weapons inspector, has testified before Congress that these weapons do not exist.

In an attempt to evade responsibility for the misleading statements that pushed the nation into war, Bush has announced plans to form an independent inquiry to look into what went wrong. An inquiry would serve the Bush administration well: it would envelop the issue in a fog of uncertainty, deflect blame onto the intelligence services, and delay any political damage until 2005, after the upcoming election. [3]

But the facts need no clarification. Despite repeated warnings from the CIA and Defense Intelligence Agency, President Bush and his administration hyped and distorted the threat that Iraq posed. [4] And now that reality is setting in, the President wants to pin the blame on someone else. We can't let him.

Congress has the power to censure the President -- to formally reprimand him for betraying the nation's trust. If ever there was a time for this, it's now. Join our call on Congress to censure President Bush at:
http://www.moveon.org/censure/?id=2298-3497923-4ITfoEn70FmtoE48QAS9_w

It's clear that we've been mislead:

* David Kay said last week, "I'm personally convinced that there were not large stockpiles of newly produced weapons of mass destruction," and "We don't find the people, the documents or the physical plants that you would expect to find if the production was going on." Kay said these things shortly after resigning from his post as Bush's chief weapons inspector in Iraq. [5]

* Bush, in his 2003 State of the Union address, said, "the British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa." [6] Yet Ambassador Joe Wilson, who was sent to Niger in February 2002 to determine whether Iraq was trying to purchase uranium materials there, concluded that "intelligence related to Iraq's nuclear weapons program was twisted to exaggerate the
Iraqi threat." [7]

* A CIA report in February 2003 said: "We do not have any direct evidence that Iraq has used the period since [1998] to reconstitute its Weapons of Mass Destruction programs." [8]

It's also clear that the misleading was deliberate:

* The respected Carnegie Endowment for International Peace recently found that the administration "systematically misrepresented the threat" from Iraq. [9]

* The basis for President Bush's African uranium claim was known at the time to be forged [10] and not credible. "Top White House officials knew that the CIA seriously disputed the claim that Saddam Hussein was seeking uranium in Africa long before the claim was included in Bush's January address to the nation," according to the Washington Post. [11]

* Secretary of State Colin Powell became alarmed at the level of intelligence distortion. When he read the first draft of his speech to the UN -- prepared for Powell by Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff -- he was so upset that he lost his temper, throwing several pages in the air and declaring, "I'm not reading this. This is bullsh--." [12]

Our democracy only works when we know the truth. We now know President Bush and his administration deliberately misled Congress and the American people. Censure is the least we should expect in response.

The independent inquiry will need a year or more to come to a conclusion, according to the Bush administration. It took less time than that for the country to go to war. We don't need more investigation, we need accountability, and we need it now.

Join our call on Congress to censure President Bush at: http://www.moveon.org/censure/?id=2298-3497923-4ITfoEn70FmtoE48QAS9_w

We'll be holding a press conference in Washington on Thursday, announcing our campaign for Censure. If you sign on now, we can count your signature at the press conference. Please sign on right away.

Thank you.

Sincerely,

--Adam, Carrie, Eli, James, Joan, Laura, Noah, Peter, Wes, and Zack
The MoveOn.org Team
Tuesday, February 3, 2004

[1] http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A54353-2004Jan27.html

[2] http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2003/03/20030317-7.html

[3] http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A3980-2004Feb1.html

[4] An excellent, comprehensive rundown on the Bush administration's deliberate distortion of intelligence is available at: http://www.americanprogress.org/site/pp.asp?c=biJRJ8OVF&b=24889

[5] http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/26/international/middleeast/26KAY.html

[6] http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2003/01/20030128-19.html

[7] http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/06/opinion/06WILS.html
Note: Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame, had her CIA cover blown, possibly by the White House, in apparent retaliation for Wilson's contradicting the White House's line on WMDs.

[8] http://msnbc.msn.com/id/3340723/

[9] http://www.ceip.org/files/pdf/Iraq3GuideFind_SummRec.pdf

[10] http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/08/international/worldspecial/08PREX.html

[11] http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/news/nation/6362092.htm

[12] http://www.usnews.com/usnews/issue/archive/030609/20030609040506.php
Note: The article with the Powell quote is available for purchase from the US News & World Report archives for $2.95.

 
Urge Congress to Reject Ashcroft's Veto Threat
From ACLU:

Despite an unprecedented public relations offensive by Attorney General Ashcroft and a veto threat from the White House, Congress is moving toward revising the Patriot Act’s most dangerous provisions.

Buoyed by the groundswell of opposition -- more than 245 communities and 3 states have passed resolutions in opposition to the PATRIOT Act -- momentum is building for legislation that would correct PATRIOT Act provisions that allow for unwarranted investigations of personal records, authorize secret “sneak and peek” searches and roll back judicial oversight.

This corrective legislation -- the SAFE Act -- would not repeal commonsense provisions in the PATRIOT Act, but would instead revise those provisions that infringe on our civil liberties without making us any safer. Yet even this modest bill drew the wrath of Attorney General Ashcroft who falsely said that it would, “make it even more difficult to mount an effective anti-terror campaign than it was before the Patriot Act was passed."

Take Action! Tell your Members of Congress to cosponsor the SAFE Act so we can be both safe and free.

Click here for more information and to send a free fax to your Members of Congress:
http://www.aclu.org/NationalSecurity/NationalSecurity.cfm?ID=13907&c=24

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For more information on other issues and the latest news, please visit our website.

 
Keep Facts Free!
We're surrounded by free factual information, but there's a bill in Congress that would lock it all up. The Database and Collections of Information Misappropriation Act (DCIMA, H.R. 3261) extends extremely broad copyright-like protections to collections of factual data - data like the price of a TV, the temperature in Arizona or infomation collected during scientific research. DCIMA would allow companies to sue anyone who interferes with their ability to profit from data that they collect. In other words, academic researchers, public libraries, Internet innovators and other database users would have to pay up if someone else claimed to have assembled the data first. This is not only unecessary, it's bad policy.

Make your voice heard with the EFF Action Center:

http://action.eff.org/action/index.asp?step=2&item=2857