 John Parker, my friend, who's here in LA with his beautiful wife Maggie, there are a couple to do this together, I'll tell you. John is a member of the International Peace Delegations accompanied by former U.S. Attorney Ramsey Clark that traveled to many countries targeted by U.S. bombings, including Syria and Sudan. He is a member of the Socialist Unity Party Harriet Tubman Center for Social Justice. And John, I know you for a long time, and thanks for being here with us tonight. And thanks for all you guys do. Thanks. Hey, I was wondering if I could share the screen here. If it's hard, it doesn't matter. I don't need to share it. I had a picture of the highway to death that was the bombing in 1991 in February, the U.S. military jets and helicopters rained napalm and cluster bombs and 30 millimeter shells on convoys of Iraqi soldiers, civilians, refugees, and at least 1,000 people were burned alive or shot to death while fleeing. And there's a picture which shows and it just gives an image of imagine this happening on the 101 or something like that on a highway and you see all these cars and carnage and just to give a picture of what U.S. war looks like. The pilots called it a turkey shoot, the ones who did that highway of death killings. They said it was like shooting fish in a barrel. And it was one of the final acts of the massive bombing by the first Bush administration. It was named Operation Desert Storm, where they gave about 89,000 tons of bombs on Iraq, killing over hundreds of thousands of people, destroyed the country's oil refineries, power grids, water stations. It's only planned for baby formula. And it just to make the point that these targets of U.S. imperialism, they have a real human cost and they're justified by vilification. The latest enemy of the U.S. that's getting in the way of U.S. profits is vilified. But even everything they said to make these wars happen is true. Even if it was true, even though it never is an entirety or if at all, just think about how brutal the killings are of the U.S. presidents responsible for the killing of millions, not just once, but in almost every U.S. war from the killing of millions in the Philippines, millions in North Korea and a combined recent wars of Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya today. And I didn't even mention Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the death by destabilization, starvation, our drones in Indonesia, Sudan, Congo and Yemen and Somalia and Pakistan from the U.S. The UN is estimating that 16 million people will die, mostly children, of starvation in Yemen due to the supported war by the U.S. with Saudi Arabia and Yemen. Now, we often accused Syria of using chemical weapons. But the fact is the U.S. employs them and pays others, including those who are fighting against the government in Syria to use them often from the usage in Vietnam to the continued use of napad in Iraq along with white phosphorus usage and other things. When I went to Iraq on the delegation there with Ramsey Clark, we visited hospitals and we went there in 2013 after their claims of chemical weapon use by Syria. We went there and we around the hospitals in Damascus, we interviewed victims of sniper attacks and the bombings. And they gave detailed explanations of how they were attacked by anti-government forces. And never mentioned the government forces that were doing this, they said, that they didn't, that's what the U.S. was in the western, many was telling us, but they had another story. We spoke to refugees who lost their homes. We heard many stories about kidnappings and ransoms of a million Syrian pounds by anti-government forces. I spoke with a reporter from the sun in the U.K. and she was extremely frustrated that the evidence she found of the then chemical attack in 2013 being blamed on the government that she had evidence that the so-called rebels were responsible for this, but she couldn't get her words published in the newspaper. Instead, they were taking evidence, so-called evidence from a person who MI6 had already linked to ISIS who lives in the U.K., supposedly reporting from Syria. There are many lies that are going on and there are lies about the chemical, so-called chemical attack that supposedly happened in Douma in Syria where many scientists and other folks including Noam Chansky and internal reports that WikiLeaks leaked in the South 2019 saying that these reports about chemical attack by Syria were unfounded and weren't compatible with the truth. In fact, the BBC was caught in a lie and had to recount. BBC editor John Williams published in his blog what amounts to an apology for his news organization's coverage of the Hula massacre that took place in Syria in 2012 in May. It was blamed on the Syrian government, but he said he found evidence to the contrary after he'd ordered. Unfortunately, that recounting was not publicized nearly as much as the accusation, but he said he quoted some a Western official and he said those opposed to President Assad have an agenda, Williams points out. One senior Western official went as far as to describe their YouTube communications as brilliant. He linked them to PSI ops, brainwashing techniques used by the U.S. and other military to convince people of things that may not necessarily be true. And these lies and distortions about Muslim fighting the U.S. being there to fight the Muslim terrorists, they had their birth during the Afghanistan intervention under Jimmy Carter. In fact, ISIS, Al Qaeda, Nusrah Front, Taliban were all given resources, weapons and money to thrive. In the Taliban's case, this started with Jimmy Carter's administration where the Mujahideen fighting the revolutionary government in Afghanistan was given billions in training to become the Taliban that we now know. And this should help folks understand that imperialism is systemic. It's not democratic or republican party, they're all part of this capitalist system of its current capitalist system of imperialism. So when Trump said he was getting out of Syria, this is what really happened. I mean, the White House had made a tactical shift in an effort to pull Turkey back into the U.S. and NATO orbit. And that shift followed the victories of Syria and its allies in eight years of war over invading mercenary forces armed and paid by the U.S., Britain, France, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Turkey, and Israel. So while Trump was tweeting about pulling out of Syria, days after several hundred U.S. troops were transferred out of northern Syria, a U.S. armored brigade invaded eastern Syria and seized the country's oil fields. And Trump said, we're leaving soldiers to secure the oil. He said that he was speaking about the estimated 2.5 billion barrels of oil reserves. He said there's massive amounts of oil and what I intend to do perhaps is make a deal with Exxon Mobile are one of our great companies to go in there and do it properly. Mark Esper was the defense secretary at the time threatened to use overwhelming force to keep Syria from using its own oil fields. You know what? I was going to set my timer. I forgot to set it. How am I doing on time here? A few more minutes. Okay. All right. Let me skip over here a little bit. I know we don't want to take too long. So on November 6th at a White House meeting, Trump and the Pentagon officials agreed to expand the U.S. military mission in Syria. So there goes all that talk about Trump getting out of Syria. Meanwhile, U.S. and armed and trained terrorists and militias that had been driven from Syria returned under the protection of an invading NATO Turkish troops. And they attacked villagers, murdered civilians and all the other things, the horrible things that they did. Trump encouraged the invasion. And on October 9th, October, they launched their offensive, Turkey had launched their offensive. And on October 10th, the U.S. vetoed the United Nations Security Council resolution condemning the invasion. So now we have the bombing of Syria and Iraq recently by Biden to supposedly protect our retaliate or the latest verbiage which really amounts to the U.S. enforcing an occupation in Iraq, which the government in Iraq said they wanted ended. So why are they there in the first place? Why is the U.S. there in the first place? They're people's forces in Iraq who are trying to get rid of the U.S. presence. And by international law, they have the right, that right, since it's an illegal occupation unwhited by the Iraqi people. This attack by Biden was a statement saying the U.S. doesn't care about international law or sovereignty as long as profits sort of be made. And even though Biden denies it, the Syrian government and media report say that media is from Syria have also reported that the U.S. coalition has continued to strengthen its illegal presence in northeastern Syria, establishing multiple bases to protect and train allied forces and terrorist organizations, operating under their command and to guard oil fields, extracting resources. And it's estimated that about $30 million per month in oil is being stolen by the U.S. again from Syria. Many have mentioned how this, I'm going to conclude here, many have mentioned how the money for war is stolen from what we need in healthcare and food, etc. But how are we going to stop them? How do we make them do that? We have to increase our power to challenge their right to run this country. How do we do that? By building our solidarity with each other in all the struggles of people fighting U.S. empire and their police domestically here, whether that be the fight against races, police murder against black and brown people, our indigenous rights, our fight against sexism and LGBTQ oppression, we have to make all these struggles, especially the struggles against racism, as part of the anti-war movement, as an anti-war struggle so that we can build the unified power necessary to not only stop U.S. war, but in this capitalist system of racism, exploitation, poverty and war. And hopefully I didn't go too long there. Thank you, John. Thank you so much for all your and Maggie's excellent organizing here in the LA area. Thanks. It will go into the record for sure.