Campaign to revoke Obamas Nobel Peace Prize

A campaign calling for the revoking of President Barack Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize got underway Tuesday April 2 with a petition launched by a quarter-million member online group.

The petition,was initiated by RootsAction.org, http://act.rootsaction.org/p/dia/action/public/?action_KEY=7647

Noting that the Obama administration “has widened the use of drones and other instruments of remote killing in several countries,” RootsAction said in a mass email that “President Obama has made perpetual war look more perpetual than ever.”

Obama accepted the Nobel award 40 months ago with a December 2009 speech in Oslo.

Policy analysts made available for interviews include. Leah Bolger, CDR, USN (Ret), past president of Veterans for Peace. She said Tuesday: “When the Nobel Committee gave the Peace Prize to President Obama in 2009, for ‘his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples,’ many criticized that decision, calling it premature and politically motivated. President Carter, himself a Nobel Laureate, called the decision ‘a bold statement of international support for his vision and commitment to peace and harmony in international relations.’ Since then, President Obama has emphatically disproven Carter’s belief by dramatically escalating the war in Afghanistan, killing thousands of innocent people with illegal drone strikes in Pakistan and elsewhere, and continuing to hold prisoners at Guantanamo.

 Bolger added: “The Nobel Committee has deeply diminished the prize by awarding it to Obama in the first place; it is now obvious . . . that they made a serious mistake. The Committee needs to revoke the prize in order to restore its value.”

Coleen Rowley, a former FBI special agent and legal counsel, wrote a “whistleblower” memo in May 2002 and testified to the Senate Judiciary Committee about some of the FBI’s pre-9/11 failures. She says that the influential Nobel Committee Secretary Geir Lundestad “has repeatedly but unsuccessfully attempted to explain how it is to be expected that the 2009 recipient Obama would be engaged in two wars as leader of the world's ‘superpower.’ So, how can the Prize continue to inspire peacemaking when it no longer is in keeping with Alfred Nobel’s original intent but instead has been turned on its head to promote militarism and war?”

Norman Solomon who wrote the book “War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death,” is founding director of the Institute for Public Accuracy and co-founder of RootsAction.org. He said Tuesday: “If President Obama is to remain as a Nobel Peace Prize winner, then Bernie Madoff may as well be Financial Planner of the Year.”