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Noted Activist Gets S.S. Checks Stopped Following Drone Protests
ANN WRIGHT, [in Hawaii] annw1946[at]gmail.com, @AnnWright46
Wright served 29 years in the U.S. Army/Army Reserves and retired as a Colonel. She also served 16 years as a U.S. diplomat in U.S. around the world, including Afghanistan. She resigned from the U.S. government in March 2003 in opposition to the war on Iraq.
She just wrote the piece “Attempting to Curtail Dissent of Seniors by Stopping Social Security Checks,” which states: “First, in 2005 and 2006 it was the Bush administration putting some of us protesting Bush’s war on Iraq on the National Crime Information Database. Yes, we had been arrested for failure to comply with orders to move from the fence in front of the White House during protests against the war on Iraq, torture at Guantanamo and other U.S. prisons in Iraq and Afghanistan or refusing to end protests by sitting in ditches at Bush’s Crawford, Texas ranch. But these were misdemeanors, not felonies, yet we were put on the FBI’s international crime list, a list for felony violations. …
“Now under the Obama administration, the latest effort to silence dissent, for those of you 62 or older, is someone in the government falsifying jail records to show that you were in jail/confinement for more than 30 days and sending the records to the Social Security Administration. SSA will then stop your monthly Social Security check and will send you a letter stating that you must repay back months of payments for the time you were allegedly in jail — in my case $4,273.60.
“On March 31, 2016, I, along with seven others, six Veterans for Peace and one Granny Peace Brigade members, was arrested at Creech drone base, Nevada as a part of the semi-annual protest against assassin drones. We spent five hours in the Clark County Jail as our arrests were processed and then were released. Our cases of being charged with ‘failure to disperse’ were eventually dropped by the Clark County court. …
“If I didn’t know better I might think this is part of the Israeli ‘lawfare’ program in which Israel attempts to derail protest against its policies by filing bogus lawsuits that end up having to be answered in court, tying up time and human and financial resources. Since I came back in October from Israeli prison from having been kidnapped on the Women’s Boat to Gaza, taken against my will to Israel, charged with entering Israel illegally and deported …again. This is the second time I have been deported from Israel for challenging the illegal Israeli naval blockade of Gaza. My deportations from Israel now total 20 years, which preclude me from visiting Israel or the West Bank.”
Wright has also been protesting outside President Obama’s Hawaii residence, calling for him to pardon whistleblower Chelsea Manning as he vacations there.
See Wright’ piece “A First-Hand Account of Women’s Boat to Gaza.”
Also see from CommonDreams: “Older Americans Pushed Into Poverty as Feds Garnish Social Security for Student Debt.”
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