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GUEST: Fernando Suarez del Solar, founder of Guerrero Azteca Peace Project, father of Jesus Suarez, one of the first American soldier to be killed in the Iraq war.

October has been the deadliest month this year for U.S. soldiers in Iraq. The U.S. military has said that 96 troops have died so far in the month of October including four Marines and a sailor killed just yesterday. The number of U.S. troop fatalities this month is also the highest since October 2005. This Saturday, Jesus Suarez del Solar, one of the first Marines killed in Iraq, will be honored, along with all soldiers and Iraqis who have died since the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq at a local event in Los Angeles. The event …

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GUEST: Glen Ford is a writer and radio commentator and the Executive Editor of The Black Agenda Report

Visit www.blackagendareport.com. This week’s commentary is called:

The Melting Pot

There’s a cliché that goes, “America is always reinventing itself.” Another way of saying this is, “White Americans are constantly lying about themselves and the country.” This continuous process of revisionism – the reinventing of history – is also the mechanism that allows white America to deny that it is committing current crimes, because a nation so good, so-well-meaning as this fictional United States could not possibly be engaged in worldwide atrocities. When American domestic and international crimes can no longer be denied, they are called “mistakes,” “aberrations out of sync with the national character, which is fundamentally benign, generous, humanitarian. Most of …

Arch bishop Oscar Romero once said:

“Peace is not the product of terror or fear.
Peace is not the silence of cemeteries.
Peace is not the silent result of violent repression.
Peace is the generous, tranquil contribution of all to the good of all.
Peace is dynamism. Peace is generosity.
It is right and it is duty.”

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GUEST: Gustavo Arellano, staff writer for the Orange County Weekly, writes the popular column “Ask a Mexican”

Orange County Congressional Candidate Tan Nguyen has stated that he will not drop out of his campaign even if he is charged with a crime relating to an intimidating letter sent to registered Democrats with Spanish surnames. Nguyen, a Republican and Vietnamese immigrant, is running against Democratic Congresswoman Loretta Sanchez in the 47th district. The source of controversy over his campaign is a targeted letter mailed out to 14,000 voters in his district that warned of jail time or deportation for any undocumented immigrant who casts a vote in the upcoming election. The letter, written in Spanish, used the word “emigrado,” a word that has no legal connotation and …

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GUEST: Dahlia Wasfi, Iraqi American activist, medical student, and speaker for Global Exchange

A survey carried out by Iraqi physicians and overseen by American academics at Johns Hopkins University and MIT, estimated recently that 655,000 more people have died in Iraq since US-led forces invaded in March 2003. In the year ending June 2006, the team calculated Iraq’s mortality rate to be roughly four times what it was the year before the war with a steady increase in mortality since the invasion. Of the 655,000 dead, 54,000 were killed by disease and other causes relating to a health care system in dire condition. According to the Iraqi Health Ministry, as of October 2005 25% of Iraq’s 18,000 physicians had left the country since the 2003 …

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GUEST: Rahul Mahajan, author of Full Spectrum Dominance and The New Crusade

Empire Notes are weekly commentaries filed by Rahul Mahajan, author of Full Spectrum Dominance and The New Crusade. Today’s commentary is about exit strategies in Iraq

Empire Notes is online at www.empirenotes.org.

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GUEST: Elliot Mincberg, Senior Vice President, General Counsel and Legal Director with People for the American Way

This past Monday marked the deadline for registering to vote in the upcoming November 7th elections. As some analysts predict that the November elections will be a potential turning point for the nation, the non-partisan Election Protection Coalition is working to ensure that all registered voters have their right to vote secured. The coalition is launching a voter assistance hotline for the election. There will also be volunteer lawyers and poll monitors on the ground in precincts most at risk for disenfranchisement. The coalition expects significant challenges in this upcoming election, as an estimated thirty million voters will be using electronic balloting for the first time. The Election Protection …

“The right to vote…is the primary right by which other rights are protected.”– Thomas Paine

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GUEST: Flores Forbes, author of “Will You Die with Me?: My Life and the Black Panther Party” and Chief Strategic Officer of the Abyssinian Development Corporation

This weekend is the 40th anniversary of the founding of the Black Panther Party. The Black Panther Party was a progressive political organization founded by Huey P. Newton as a powerful movement for social change. The party was the only black organization in the entire history of black American resistance in the United States that was armed and promoted a revolutionary agenda.

Party leaders required members to volunteer long hours and memorize 36 books on black history and socialism. They served food to hungry children in a 5 a.m. breakfast program in local churches, sold the party’s official newspaper, and registered voters. They offered groceries and …

You can jail a Revolutionary, but you can’t jail the Revolution. — Huey Newton