Thoughts on Occupy: the method is the goal

A few thoughts about the Occupy Movement:

First, I am overjoyed that this movement has been overwhelmingly nonviolent in its methods and intent.  This in itself is huge.  Through many of the demonstrations already staged, the effectiveness of nonviolent strategies has been reinforced to participants and observers.  In cases where nonviolent discipline has held most strongly, as in the case of the UC Davis students, the movement has gained its greatest support. 

I am very impressed with the breadth of creativity in tactics and expression.  I love all the kinds of art forms that participants have been using.  I was an occupier on the first day and took part in a street theatre action, and it felt right to be using the creative arts right from the beginning.

The emphasis on democratic, truly grassroots process bodes well.  Always, the methods are embedded in the ends achieved.  It's wonderful to see groups of people sitting together, doing the hard, hard work of consensus building.  I have some experience with this from taking part in Quaker business meetings, and I appreciate both the rewards and the challenges of  the consensus process.

I am concerned that targeting the "1%" as culprits in our economic stuggles may lead to certain people being labeled enemies.  To me, the enemy is not certain people, but rather systemic problems in US society and culture. Militarism is a culprit, for example, but that doesn't mean soldiers are enemies.  In fact, like city police, military personnel are caught in the problems of the system in many ways, just as civilians are.  If we can focus on reducing the resources put into maintaining a huge military structure, then that is addressing the problem.  Focusing on the wealthy or the police doesn't get to the heart of the matter, even though the confrontations have been educational.

This is where I think the nonviolent methods used by occupiers have been teaching us well.  We can see so clearly that, as the UC Davis students said, words are greater than weapons.  We have the tools of nonviolence to protect ourselves and to make change. 

So, to me, this is where the Occupy movement may lead.  As Occupy and the hundreds of thousands of nonviolent demonstrators across the Middle East have been proving, people power really can trump military power.  Military might is an obstacle to democratic reform, not a champion of it.  If people all over the world decide it, we can divest from the weapons trade, a dead-end business.  We do not need huge military forces to "protect" us. We can draw them down and invest instead in businesses that create rather than destroy. I am convinced that our economy will prosper if we do that.


        

Blog break, but please read Waging Nonviolence!

Oh my, the time has flown.  I had a family event come up last spring and just didn't get back to blogging after that.  But, truly wondrous and courageous nonviolence has been emerging all over the world this year, and I've been thrilled.  I recommend the Waging Nonviolence blog for great reporting and analysis in this age of peacemaking.

People Power in Wisconsin

I've been glued, this morning, to live video from the Madison capitol building, listening to the articulate responses of Wisconsinites who have spent the night there, upholding constitutional freedoms on behalf of us all.  For some historical context, I like this editorial published today by the Capital Times, and it's good to see one publication championing another.  Austin's own Jim Hightower will be part of The Progressive event this weekend. 

Progressive Wisconsin: A Tradition of Opposing Corporate Power



Capital Times Editorial


“The great issue before the American people today is the control of their own government. In the midst of political struggle, it is not easy to see the historical relations of the present Progressive movement. But it represents a conflict as old as the history of man — the fight to maintain human liberty, the rights of all people.” — Robert M. La Follette, 1912






Carnations are laid on a bust of Robert La Follette in the Capitol rotunda as demonstrations continued in Madison on Monday, Feb. 21, 2011. (CRAIG SCHREINER — State Journal)


More than a century ago, on a Fourth of July in Mineral Point, Robert M. La Follette sounded the call against corporate power.


“So multifarious have become corporate affairs, so many concessions and privileges have been accorded them by legislation -- so many more are sought by further legislation -- that their specially retained representatives are either elected to office, directly in their interests, or maintained in a perpetual lobby to serve them,” declared the founder of the progressive movement.
“Hence it is that the corporation does not limit its operations to the legitimate conduct of its business. Human nature everywhere is selfish, and with the vast power which consolidated capital can wield, with the impossibility of fixing any personal or moral responsibility for corporate acts, its commands are heard and obeyed in the capitals of the state and nation.”


La Follette saw unrestrained corporate power as the great threat to representative government.


When corporations are allowed to engage in political competition, using their vast resources to warp our electoral processes, La Follette warned that certain results would be guaranteed by a government no longer representative of the people but instead beholden to paymasters in distant boardrooms.


“When legislatures will boldly repudiate their constituents and violate the pledges of their platforms, then indeed have the servants become the masters, and the people ceased to be sovereign -- gone the government of equal rights and equal responsibilities, lost the jewel of constitutional liberty. Do not look to such lawmakers to restrain corporations within proper limits. Do not look to such lawmakers to equalize the burden of taxation,” warned La Follette.


This language sounds prescient at a moment when Gov. Scott Walker pockets checks from billionaire out-of-state campaign donors, then accepts a call he presumes to be from one of those donors and laughs about their shared “vested interest” in breaking public employee unions.


But the progressive movement, founded by La Follette to tip the balance back toward government of, by and for the people, was also prescient.


The power struggle now going on in Wisconsin, between Walker and his billionaire donors on one side and public workers, teachers, private workers, farmers and students on the other, is not a new one. Nor is the response to it.  It has been a good long time since we have seen this sort of exercise of our rights to assemble and petition for the redress of grievances, this sort of mass mobilization of working people, this sort of uprising against corporate power and corrupt politicians.


But the struggle has roots, in this state’s history and its present.


La Follette died in 1925. But the progressive flame has been kept burning since by institutions and individuals. The Madison-based Progressive magazine, which Robert and Belle La Follette began with a circle of allies in 1909, has been the steady champion of its founding faith, often working in conjunction with this newspaper in Wisconsin but also providing a national and international platform for progressive ideals and struggles.


Over the past decade, Ed Garvey and a community of volunteers from across the state built the “Fighting Bob” projects -- Fighting Bob Fest, www.fightingbob.com, the Peoples’ Legislature -- which renewed an interest in the La Follette legacy and renewed the tradition of mass gatherings.


Along with unions and farm groups that have maintained progressive traditions, as well as individuals who have remembered what made Wisconsin great, these institutions kept a consciousness that underpins and strengthens our state’s remarkable response to the assault on worker rights and representative government that Walker has launched.


At 7 p.m. Saturday, at the Barrymore Theatre, The Progressive will sponsor a free “Speak-Out for Workers’ Rights: Say NO to Union-Busting” rally, featuring Congresswoman Tammy Baldwin, D-Madison; Congressman Dennis Kucinich, D-Ohio; and Texas populist Jim Hightower. They’ll be joined by Garvey and The Progressive’s Matt Rothschild and Ruth Conniff.


If you hear an echo, it will be that of La Follette saying: “Think of the heroes who died to make this country free; think of their sons who died to keep it undivided upon the map of the world. Shall we, their children, basely surrender our birthright and say representative government is a failure? No, never, until Bunker Hill and Little Round Top sink into the very earth. Let us here, today, under this flag we all love, hallowed by the memory of all that has been sacrificed for it and for us, dedicate ourselves to winning back the independence of this country, to emancipating this generation and throwing off from the neck of the freemen of America the yoke of the political machine.”


La Follette and the progressives of another century fought the rail barons and their stalwart Republican pawns. The progressives of this day fight the Koch brothers and their Walker spawn. The conflict is nothing new. And it remains as it has ever been: “the fight to maintain human liberty, the rights of all people.”


© 2011 The Capital Times.

Day of the Fallen

The Workers Defense Project organized a march and rally today called 'Day of the Fallen" to commemorate the deaths of construction workers in the state of Texas.  We began the march at the Federal Building Plaza and carried 138 black coffin replicas to the steps of the Texas Capitol. 

Although the coffins were built lightly of foam core board and contained only air, I felt the heaviness of the sadness we were conveying.

People had come for the march from as far away as El Paso, Houston, Dallas and San Antonio.  We numbered about 300, I think.  Included were union members and family members of construction workers who had died on the job.

Jim Hightower spoke, and Eliza Gilkyson sang.  Rev. Jim Rigby emceed.  There were prayers in English and in Espanol, gospel music and a singalong of "If I had a hammer," led by a young trio.

We stood with our CodePink banner in solidarity, and I watched legislators and their aides come out of the capitol, skirting our demonstration, looking sideways at the coffins.  I wanted them to stop and listen, but they walked quickly on.

On my way home, I looked out the bus window at the beautiful buildings in our downtown, the new lofts and storefronts.  Most of the people who built them can not afford to live in them.  Some of the people who built them were injured on the job.  Some were not paid for their work.  When I pass the spot on Rio Grande where three immigrant men fell to their deaths because of faulty equipment, I sense their spirits are present, asking me why.  The chic little shop that opened a few feet from where the men hit the earth is called, "Bodega on Rio."         

On, Wisconsin!

As a native Wisconsinite transplanted in Texas, I've been following the news out of Madison with much interest and enthusiasm.  I talked with my mother today, who lives in my Wisconsin hometown, just east of Madison.  She said that yesterday, she felt she just had to get out and show her support for the capitol protests.  So, she made a sign that read, "Negotiation is the heart of democracy" and, together with my dad, who held a peace sign, bundled up and went downtown to join a vigil with several friends.  They roused many more honks than thumbs down, my mom said.  In their mid-eighties, my folks are still active and engaged citizens, models of participation.  Yes, they can!

My folks and I also often talk about the solutions we see for the money crunch.  Wisconsin has a $3.6 billion shortfall this year.  US military operations in Iraq are expected to cost $3.8 billion per month this year.  Costs for US military operations in Afghanistan this year are projected to run $9.5 billion per month.  In 2008, the cost of the Iraq war was approximately $16.5 billion per month.

States rely on many sources of federal funds.  When war drains billions from the federal budget, states feel the sqeeze.  Add to that the direct costs of war to state budgets -- Wisconsin National Guard troops sent abroad, health care costs of injured veterans and 130 Wisconsin troop deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Stop funding war.  Schools will have everything they need.

photo by John Hart from the Wisconsin State Journal

Victory of Nonviolence in Egypt

I am absolutely elated by the triumph of nonviolent people power in Egypt! Like so many supporters all over the world, I’ve been glued to news from Egypt since January 25, feeling a mixture of hope and concern for the movement, praying that demonstrators would be able to adhere to nonviolence despite violence done to them. Every day, my hope deepened as people displayed great courage and creativity in the face of weapons, police force, imprisonment and torture. And now, today, such joyous success! When tyranny is overcome through the power of nonviolence, there is no sweeter victory.


I have to think about Iraq – and how Saddam Hussein likewise could have been ousted through a people’s movement, had there been enough support for a civil resistance movement to grow. Instead, the US did exactly the opposite – destroying civil society through the savage bombings of 1991 and the years of debilitating economic sanctions that followed. The invasion of 2003 was not only a crime against an already battered people, it was the antithesis of how to encourage democratic reform. The people’s movement in Egypt has put in even starker relief the debacle of US policy in Iraq and gives us a vision of what might have been. Democracy cannot be forced at the point of a gun.

A positive corollary of the Egyptian people’s movement is this: I have a sense that during these 18 days of mass demonstrations, there has been less violence throughout the Middle East. People have watched the movement in Tunisia, then in Egypt with much interest, taking note that mass nonviolent protest has garnered much more sympathetic attention around the world than terror attacks.  I can imagine that someone who might have been contemplating committing a suicide bombing would now change his mind.  The success of the nonviolent movement will surely motivate more groups and individuals to take this lesson from the Egyptian people and acknowledge that violent strategies are too costly and only serve to justify state repression and violent intervention.

Now, will this obvious lesson also be learned by the Pentagon?

Flowers and solidarity in Egypt

wonderful account by Medea Benjamin, reporting from Cairo:

Our first attempt to buy flowers for the demonstrators in Cairo's Tahrir Square was thwarted by a crazed-looking guy with a gun in one hand and a homemade spear in another (pruning shears taped to a broomstick, to be exact). Three of us, all Americans, were in a taxi driving to the flower market when this fellow stopped our car at gunpoint. His hand on the trigger, he forced us to pull over. Soon we were surrounded by a dozen pro-Mubarak thugs who started yelling in Arabic and broken English that foreigners like us were causing all the trouble in Egypt.

They said they were policemen but none was wearing a uniform. They seized our passports and then four of these characters squeezed into our taxi to "take us to government headquarters." Frantic, we started calling everyone we knew--local lawyers and activists, friends back home, the U.S. Embassy.

Soon the car stopped at an intersection manned by about ten soldiers. The officer in charge peered into the car and asked us where we were from. "Americans," he smiled with approval. "I love America." He started chatting about his training in Ft. Eustis, Virginia, while we sat terrified. To our amazement, he ordered our kidnappers to get out of our taxi, return our passports and let us go. We sped off, not looking back. Our poor taxi driver was shaking. "No flowers," he said. "Hotel."

Back at the hotel, we discussed our options. We were thankful not to be in some dark interrogation room being beaten to a pulp, but we still wanted to get the flowers. Folks back home had donated money for us to support the activists, and these people were putting their lives at risk to overthrow a dictator supported by our taxdollars. We could donate blankets, food and medicines through Egyptian groups, but we had to get the flowers ourselves.

We decided that the blonds, Billy Kelly and I, would stay behind and we'd send Tighe Barry and Rob Mosrie, who blend in more. Instead of taking a taxi, they'd go by metro. If stopped, they would say they were buying flowers for a friend's funeral.


Miraculously, they returned two hours later with a truckload of flowers. Praying that no thugs would beat us up along the way, we piled the flowers in our arms, grabbed our "Solidarity with Egyptian People" banner, and headed toward the square.

People along the street started clapping, smiling, giving us the thumbs up. "Free, free Egypt," we shouted, as we were swept into the square by a sea of people. They were hugging us, kissing us, snapping our photos--and crushing us and the flowers. Thankfully, we were rescued from the chaos by a group of men who linked arms to form a ring around us. Steering us toward the main stage, they hoisted us onto the railing so that people could see us. We began throwing roses, carnations, gladiolas and marigolds into the cheering crowd who yelled out, in Arabic, "The People, United, Will Never Be Defeated."

It was exhilarating. What a privilege to feel connected to this joyous mass of humanity that was charting a new course for the entire Middle East. I was in awe of their bravery, their devotion, their love for their country and each other. I looked down and saw a teenager who had ripped open his shirt to proudly show us his chest full of bandages from the street battles. "You are my family," he shouted, as he jumped up and down, crying and blowing kisses our way. "I love you."

All of a sudden, there was a commotion next to us. A military man was making his way to the stage. It was General Hassan El-Rawani, the head of the army's central command, coming to speak to the masses. Someone handed him a white gladiola. He took it awkwardly, looked over at us and smiled. Then he addressed the crowd.

The military has been in an untenable position and this was a particularly tense day. The commanders had promised they would not attack peaceful protesters, but the government was fed up with the protesters camping out in the city's main plaza. Today was Saturday, day 12 of the uprising. The army had orders to clear the square by Sunday so that life in Cairo could "get back to normal." Everyone was worried about what the army would do. The crowd became silent as the General spoke.

He urged the people to leave the square peacefully. He told them they had won, that a new government had already been appointed. It was time to go home.

He also warned the people not to be manipulated by outside forces who were pushing them to keep up the protests. Like the thugs who carjacked us at gunpoint earlier in the day, pro-Mubarak forces have been putting forth this line that the protests are instigated by foreign forces--from Iran and Hamas to America and Israel--who want to create instability in Egypt.

One of the young pro-democracy organizers looked at us while the General was speaking and laughed. "It's crazy how they try to blame this purely Egyptian uprising on foreigners," he said. "Perhaps they'll try to say that these flowers are part of some American plot to incite the masses."

Meanwhile, the General was still asking the protesters to leave the square. They were respectful, but stood their ground. "We won't go till Mubarak goes," they chanted back at him.

Having tried his best, the General stepped down from the stage and walked back through the crowd. He was still holding the white gladiola. And the next day, the people were still holding the square.

photo by Medea Benjamin

Guns don't protect people. People do.

beautiful photograph of Christians protecting Muslims at prayer, posted by NevineZaki, published on OpEd News and elsewhere.

What MLK might have told us today

Good piece by Jim Harrington, director of the Texas Civil Right Project:

Perhaps, if the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. were to write a letter on the holiday set aside for him, it might go something like this, albeit more eloquent:

Dear Brothers and Sisters:

Forty-seven years ago, in August 1963, while imprisoned in the Birmingham jail for nonviolent demonstrations against segregation, I wrote a letter in longhand to eight religious leaders. They had criticized me for moving too fast on issues that didn't concern me, and saw me as an outsider from Atlanta, Georgia.

I reminded my religious colleagues that "Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly. Anyone who lives inside the United States can never be considered an outsider."

Today, as I look about, I am bewildered by the many political leaders, who assemble each year to commemorate me. They almost seem to make me a saint. It is as if many of them never heard my message. These leaders forget about my unrelenting challenge to this country's economic structures that leave so many people in severe poverty. Do they remember I was assassinated while trying to help low-paid Memphis sanitation workers raise their salaries? Do they not hear my lament about the racial barriers in education?

Instead, they focus only on the "safe" part of my life, not my voice lifted in prophecy against war and poverty, for which I was severely chastised. How can they not answer those contradictions I spent my life laying bare about the United States?

They ignore the many times I called America to task for using war against perceived national security threats. Then, it was Vietnam. Now, it is Iraq and Afghanistan.

When will Americans heed the vision of Isaiah to transform our weaponry of death into tools for peace to end world poverty?

Terrorists build off social inequality, lack of education, poverty, and a perverted view of the United States, which they perceive as materialistic and militarily aggressive. War, the killing of innocent people, and destroying social infrastructure provide them with recruiting opportunities they would not otherwise have.

What if the United States had used the $1.3 trillion it has spent on the wars to build schools and hospitals in foreign lands? Or starting farming coops? Those would have yielded more success in our common struggle against terrorism. And the world economy would have been better off.

Instead, 7,000 troops have died -- not to mention the tens of thousands now disabled, and a hundred thousand or more non-combatant men, women, and children in Afghanistan and Iraq.

I also lament the attacks on immigrants in our country, people who have migrated here to support their families. Perpetrating discrimination against them because of their national origin or religion will come to justify discrimination against others, an alarming regression in the hard-fought victories we won so painstakingly.

As Leviticus reminds us, "When an alien resides with you in your land, you shall not oppress the alien. The alien who resides with you shall be to you as the citizen among you; you shall love the alien as yourself."

When you get together on my birthday holiday, don't just celebrate the strides we have made -- for many more remain to you. Organize to end injustice, anywhere and everywhere.

Your brother,

Martin

James C. Harrington is a civil rights lawyer and professor in Austin.

photo by makingpeace from today's MLK March and Celebration in Austin, Texas

Victory for DC civil disobedience

Good news issued yesterday by Veterans for Peace:

Washington, D.C. – January 4, 2011: Anti-war military veterans and other activists celebrated a breakthrough victory today in DC Superior Court, when charges were dropped, following arrests in front of the White House, on December 16, 2010. Over 131 people were arrested in a major veteran-led protest while participating in non-violent civil resistance in a driving snowstorm. US Park Police charged all 131 protesters with “Failure to Obey a Lawful Order,” when they refused to move. All remained fixed to the White House fence demanding an end to the continuing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and further US aggression in the region.
Among those arrested were members of the leadership of the national organization Veterans for Peace , Pentagon Papers whistleblower Dr. Daniel Ellsberg; Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Chris Hedges; former senior CIA analyst Ray McGovern; and, Dr. Margaret Flowers, advocate for single-payer health care.
Forty-Two arrested opted to appear in court and go to trial with the first group appearing in DC Superior Court on January 4, 2011. Prosecutors from the DC Attorney General’s office stated that the Government “declined to file charges due to missing or incomplete police paperwork.” Presiding Magistrate Judge Richard Ringell confirmed that the cases were dropped and defendants were free to leave.
Those who participated in this action make this statement:

“This is clearly a victory for opposition to undeclared wars which are illegal under international law, have led to the destruction of societies in Iraq and Afghanistan, bled the US Treasury in a time of recession, and caused human rights violations against civilians and combatants. Many of us will return to Washington, DC, to support an action on Tuesday, January 11, 2011 to protest the continued use of Guantanamo detention facility, including torture of detainees in violation of international law.”

The defendants were represented by co-counsels Ann Wilcox, Esq. and Mark Goldstone, Esq. Ms. Wilcox stated: “clearly the Government and Police felt that these veterans and their supporters acted with the courage of their convictions, and did not wish to spend the time and funds necessary for a trial proceeding. This is a major victory for the peace movement.”
For more information visit www.stopthesewars.org or on facebook.

Veterans carry out civil disobedience mission at White House gates

In cold and snowy conditions in Washington DC on Thursday, some 131 peace advocates, most of them military veterans, were arrested at the White House gates in a planned nonviolent civil disobedience action organized principally by members of Veterans for Peace. Among those arrested was Daniel Ellsberg, who, along with journalist, Chris Hedges and others, spoke eloquently before their arrests. Good videos and photos posted at the Veterans for Peace website.

photos above by Ellen Rachel Davidson

March of the Dead at SMU

Good piece by Medea Benjamin, published on Huffington Post:

Several thousand people lined up to see George Bush, Dick Cheney and Condoleezza Rice shovel dirt into a hole at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, the site slated to become the George Bush Presidential Center housing a museum, library and archives.

Over 100 peace activists showed up to protest, including New York City artist Laurie Arbiter, who helped organize a March of the Dead and carried a sign asking "Does America Have a Conscience?" "Rather than build a library, we should leave the broken ground and just fill it with a big pile of rubble," said Arbiter. "That would truly represent the catastrophic results of the Bush Administration."



As part of the March of the Dead, protesters dressed in black, wore white death masks and had signs around their necks representing dead Iraqis, Afghans and U.S. soldiers. The dramatic march stopped traffic and provoked strong emotions in passers-by, participants and even the police. Renee Schultz, who drove from Indianapolis to join the protest, wore the death mask and a sign representing a 23-year-old female U.S. soldier killed in Iraq. "When I first put on the mask, I just stood there and cried. I kept thinking, 'I am 23 years old and had my whole life ahead of me. Why did I die?'" Schultz looked over at the riot police and noticed that one of them also had tears streaming down his eyes.

When the marchers attempted to reach the public viewing area, the police forced them back to the designated "protest pen" far from the ceremony. One of the protesters, a wheelchair-bound veteran of the Korean War and World War II, angrily told the police that he did not fight in two wars to be told that his freedom of speech would be confined to a "protest zone."

The gathering was part of a three-day People's Response, filled with rallies, marches, teach-ins, and exhibits of crosses and soldiers' boots to represent the war dead. Organized by Texans for Peace, The Dallas Peace Center, CODEPINK and Veterans for Peace, among others, the speakers included former FBI agent Colleen Rowley, former CIA agent Ray McGovern, retired Colonel Ann Wright, professor Robert Jensen, and Texas State Representative Lon Burnam.

Among the protesters was also Cindy Sheehan, the Gold Star mother who led a prolonged protest outside Bush's ranch in Crawford, Texas in 2005. "Bush should not be allowed to profit from war crimes, crimes that he has even admitted to," said Sheehan. "It's not right that he will make millions from his book and speaking engagements, while millions have been killed, displaced, tortured and had their lives ruined because of him."

The protesters focused on the lies Bush told the American public to justify invading Iraq, his authorization of torture and the need for accountability. "Accountability is the sign of a true democracy," said former CIA agent Ray McGovern. "No one should be above the law and the truth must not be buried or rewritten."

Protesters were also concerned about the policies the new Bush Center will promote. President Bush said the Center would include an "action-oriented institute" to advance the principles his administration stood for, including the "benefits of limiting the role of government in people's lives." According to local organizer Leslie Harris of CODEPINK, "this really means promoting the same kinds of disastrous policies that brought us pre-emptive war, economic crisis, environmental disaster, unprecedented presidential power, and diminished civil and human rights. We can't let one of America's worst presidents shape our future policies."

The peace activists who came to protest Bush also discussed their disappointment with the Obama administration and the difficulties they anticipate in pushing the new, more conservative Congress to stop funding the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Among the actions they encouraged were:

· supporting the Midwest anti-war activists whose homes were raided by the FBI and supporting the January 15 FBI protest in Washington DC;
· promoting local campaigns, including citywide resolutions, to bring our war dollars home;
· reaching out to allies, particularly groups victimized by the economic crisis, but also reaching out to members of the Tea Party who want to see cuts in Pentagon spending;
· pressuring the State Department to stop using private security contractors;
· supporting the December 16 veteran-led civilian disobedience in Washington DC;
· organizing a delegation to Iraq to take testimonies from Iraqis about George Bush and the legacy of the US invasion;
· building on the new calls by Amnesty International and the ACLU to prosecute Bush for war crimes;
· stopping John Yoo, author of the "torture memos", from teaching law at the UC Berkeley law school.

For some light entertainment after long days of protest, a group stopped by local Barnes and Noble to reshelve -- and photograph -- Bush's Decision Points in a more appropriate place in the store. These included placing the book next to The Murder Business in the True Crimes section, Wing Nuts in the Fantasy Section, When Law Fails: Making Sense of Miscarriages of Justice in the Legal Section, and our favorite in the Children's Section, Dr. Seuss' Will You Please Go Now?" With the renewed media attention on George Bush, including his sanctioning of torture, Bush might do well to take Dr. Seuss' advice.

AP photo by G.J. McCarthy

The ground truth of the Bush Lie-Bury

Great AP photo by G.J. McCarthy from today's demonstration during groundbreaking ceremonies for the Bush Lie-Bury at SMU University.

Our message on Election Day/All Souls' Day

International Day of Peace

On International Day of Peace, Sept. 21, we CodePink folks headed down to an intersection near City Hall to hold a large sign made by Heidi and a peace sign to accompany it. Just as we arrived, rain began to pour, so we stood a bit back from the road under the City Hall amphitheatre awning. Fortunately, Heidi had made the lettering large and bold, and we carried on!

Kathy Kelly: A Ground Zero Reflection

Posted on today's Waging Nonviolence blog:

The Indefensible Drones: A Ground Zero Reflection

by Kathy Kelly

Libby and Jerica are in the front seat of the Prius, and Mary and I are in back. We just left Oklahoma, we’re heading into Shamrock, Texas, and tomorrow we’ll be in Indian Springs, Nevada, home of Creech Air Force Base. We’ve been discussing our legal defense.

The state of Nevada has charged Libby and me, along with twelve others, with criminal trespass onto the base. On April 9, 2009, after a ten-day vigil outside the air force base, we entered it with a letter we wanted to circulate among the base personnel, describing our opposition to a massive targeted assassination program. Our trial date is set for September 14.

Creech is one of several homes of the U.S. military’s aerial drone program. U.S. Air Force personnel there pilot surveillance and combat drones, unmanned aerial vehicles with which they are instructed to carry out extrajudicial killings in Afghanistan and Iraq. The different kinds of drone include the “Predator” and the “Reaper.” The Obama administration favors a combination of drone attacks and Joint Special Operations raids to pursue its stated goal of eliminating whatever Al Qaeda presence exists in these countries. As the U.S. accelerates this campaign, we hear from UN special rapporteur for extrajudicial executions, Philip Alston, who suggests that U.S. citizens may be asleep at the wheel, oblivious to clear violations of international law which we have real obligations to prevent (or at the very least discuss). Many citizens are now focused on the anniversary of September 11th and the controversy over whether an Islamic Center should be built near Ground Zero. Corporate media does little to help ordinary U.S. people understand that the drones which hover over potential targets in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen create small “ground zeroes” in multiple locales on an everyday basis.

Libby, at the wheel, is telling Jerica about her visit to Kabul, in 1970. “I worked for Pan Am,” said Libby, “and that meant being able to stay for free at the Intercontinental Hotel in Kabul. After landing in Pakistan, we hired a driver to take us across the Khyber Pass into Afghanistan. All along the highway we saw herds of camel traveling along a parallel old road. I wonder if the camel market in Kabul is still there?”

Jerica says she’ll look for it. She and I have been hard at work to obtain visas and arrange flights for an October trip to Pakistan and Afghanistan. [Libby is exceptional in that she hasn't tried to talk Jerica out of the dangerous travel.]

Conversation switches to whatever CD has just come on, and I tune out, wondering if I’ve done my share of issuing warnings to Jerica about traveling in a war zone.

Tinny music and rural Texan countryside blend together.

My thoughts drift to the Emergency Surgical Center for Victims of War, in Kabul. A little over two months ago, Josh and I met Nur Said, age 11, in the hospital’s ward for young boys injured by various explosions. Most of the boys welcomed a diversion from the ward’s tedium, and they were especially eager to sit outside, in the hospital garden, where they’d form a circle and talk together for hours. Nur Said stayed indoors. Too miserable to talk, he’d merely nod at us, his hazel eyes welling up with tears. Weeks earlier, he had been part of a hardy band of youngsters that helped bolster their family incomes by searching for scrap metal and unearthing land mines on a mountainside in Afghanistan. Finding an unexploded land mine was a eureka for the children because, once opened, the valuable brass parts could be extracted and sold. Nur had a land mine in hand when it suddenly exploded, ripping four fingers off his right hand and blinding him in his left eye.

On a sad continuum of misfortune, Nur and his companions fared better than another group of youngsters scavenging for scrap metal in the Kunar Province on August 26th.

Following an alleged Taliban attack on a nearby police station, NATO forces flew overhead to “engage” the militants. If the engagement includes bombing the area under scrutiny, it would be more apt to say that NATO aimed to puree the militants. But in this case, the bombers mistook the children for militants and killed six of them, aged 6 to 12. Local police said there were no Taliban at the site during the attack, only children.

General Petraeus assures his superiors that the U.S. is effectively using drone surveillance, sensors and other robotic means of gaining intelligence to assure that they are hunting down the right targets for assassination. But survivors of these attacks insist that civilians are at risk. In Afghanistan, thirty high schools have shut down because the parents say that their children are distracted by the drones flying overhead and that it’s unsafe for them to gather in the schools.

I think of Nur, trapped in his misery, at the Emergency surgical center. He’ll be one among many thousands of amputees whose lives are forever altered by the war and poverty that afflict his country. Many of these survivors are likely to feel intense hatred toward their persecutors. 300 villagers in the Sayed Abad district of Wardak province took to the streets in protest on August 12, following an alleged U.S. night raid. “They murdered three students and detained five others,” one of the protesters said. “All of them were civilians.” Villagers, shocked by the killing, shouted that they didn’t want Americans in Afghanistan. According to village eyewitnesses, American troops stormed into a family home and shot three brothers, all young men, and then took their father into custody. One of the young men was a student who had returned to the family home to celebrate the traditional “iftar” fast at the beginning of Ramadan. Local policemen are investigating the allegations, and NATO recently conceded that they may have killed some civilians. (see www.vcnv.org Afghanistan Atrocities update).

The drones feed hourly intelligence information to U.S. war commanders, but the machinery can’t inform people about the spiraling anger as the U.S. conducts assassination operations in countries throughout the 1.3 billion-strong Muslim world. “Sold as defending Americans,” writes Fred Branfman, “(it) is actually endangering us all. Those responsible for it, primarily General Petraeus, are recklessly seeking short-term tactical advantage while making an enormous long-term strategic error that could lead to countless American deaths in the years and decades to come.”

The Prius is comfortable, but my side of the backseat has become a makeshift office. The most important file contains Bill Quigley’s comprehensive argumentation as to why the court should allow us to present a necessity defense based on international law. Bill is the Legal Director for the Center for Constitutional Rights. On September 14, we want to call on him as an expert witness. We and our codefendants have chosen to mount a pro se defense to try to persuade our judge that far from committing a crime we have exercised our rights and our duties, under international and U.S. law, to try to prevent one and to raise public opposition to usage of drones in “targeted” assassinations.

Jerica hands me the questions we can use to elicit Bill’s testimony. We try to word our questions so that the evidence will be admissible in court. “Could Bill please inform the court about citizen’s responsibilities under international law, could he explain to the court what articles and statutes we will be invoking?” To a layperson, it seems like an elaborate game of “Mother May-I,” and we haven’t even started developing questions to ask Col. Ann Wright, the former U.S. diplomat, who had helped re-open the U.S. Embassy in Kabul shortly before resigning her job in a refusal to cooperate with buildup toward the May 2003 U.S. Shock and Awe invasion of Iraq.

Rounding out our trio of expert witnesses is former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark. We hope his personal experience within the U.S. government might arouse the court’s more careful attention to the seldom-discussed legal issues that are fundamentally at stake here. However, the judge has already indicated that his calendar only allots one day for our trial.

Libby, Jerica, Mary and I have blocked out at least ten days, inclusive of travel, for our small contribution to an ongoing effort of people around the world working to put drones on trial. We’re in New Mexico now. I feel cramped and restless, and I wonder if Tucumcari, where we plan to stop for lunch, has internet. We can’t possibly bring the testimony of Afghans and Pakistanis to court this Tuesday. Their testimony, borne on bodies scarred and mutilated and harbored in memories of nightmare, will never be given away and cannot be given in court. Extrajudicial killings are killings without rule of law, without trial. Few if any Afghan or Pakistani civilian survivors of U.S. wars will ever travel to a U.S. court of law for consideration of their grievances.

And at this moment I realize that if we were four Afghans or Pakistanis or Iraqis traveling in a war zone, we’d have spent this entire trip watching not the Southwestern landscape, but the skies.

Under The Hood press conference coverage: Killeen Daily Herald

Good article from yesterday's Killeen Daily Herald. The online posting also includes testimony offered by visiting speaker, Dr. Dahlia Wasfi, whose joint Jewish/American/Iraqi heritage gives her a special perspective on what is happening in Iraq.

Rally for Peace
by Amanda Kim Stairrett, Killeen Daily Herald

Peace activists gathered in Killeen Monday morning to speak out against U.S. military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The event, which was hosted at Killeen's Under the Hood Café, focused on Iraq and the president's recent announcement that U.S. combat operations ended there today. Speakers also questioned the deployment of the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment to Iraq. The final of several thousand of the regiment's troopers departed Fort Hood for the Middle East Friday in what military officials call an advise-and-assist mission. Those soldiers will assist Provincial Reconstruction Teams and help prepare Iraqi security forces to care for and protect their own nation.

The 1st Cavalry Division's 4th Brigade Combat Team will deploy soon for the same mission.

Central Texas activists were in town Aug. 23 to protest the regiment's deployment. As buses carried soldiers from main post to West Fort Hood's Robert Gray Army Airfield, demonstrators waited on the overpass with their headlights turned off, according to information from Fort Hood and videos posted on YouTube by participants.

As the buses drove south on Clarke Road Gate at about 3:40 a.m., the demonstrators held up banners and chanted. Several blocked the buses' path for a short time.

"Acting to protect Department of Defense personnel and equipment, Fort Hood police moved the demonstrators away from the intersection to the sidewalk," read a statement from Fort Hood.

Individuals were released without incident and the bus convoy continued to the airfield, it went on to read.

Post officials did have advance knowledge about the demonstration, they said.

Monday's speakers included Cynthia Thomas, Under the Hood manager; Rep. Lon Burnam, a Democrat from Fort Worth and former director of the Dallas Peace Center; Dr. Dahlia Wasfi, a peace activist of Muslim and Jewish heritage; Larry Egly, of the Peace and Justice Support Network of Mennonite Church USA; and Leslie Cunningham, of Texas Labor Against the War.

CodePink Austin, Iraq Veterans Against the War and Veterans For Peace were also represented.

Monday's event was just one of two in Central Texas "aimed at peeling back the mass deception surrounding 'the end of combat operations,'" according to information from Under the Hood. The first was a talk in Austin Sunday featuring Wasfi.

Most Americans are lulled to sleep because they think the war is over, Burnam said. He attacked Presidents Bush and Obama, saying the "expansionist" war was an illegal and immoral occupation — something that was fiscally wrong to start seven years ago.

Burnam heavily criticized the Iraq war's financial burden on the country, saying it was wrong for Bush to start two "outrageous" wars while providing tax cuts. Burnam said he was tired of officials using the "financial back of us working folks" to fund conflicts, and quoted a 1953 speech by President Dwight Eisenhower: "Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed."

It is time for Obama to end the occupation, end tax cuts for the rich and cure a deficit that will hurt "our children and grandchildren," Burnam went on to say.

Thomas said Under the Hood started a telephone campaign to make sure non-deployable soldiers were not deployed. The organization has previously worked with soldiers and families from the regiment who said they were not fit to deploy.

The administration and command know there aren't enough soldiers to cover two wars, Thomas said, and they continue to ignore family members and soldiers instead of focusing on their well-being.

"This community is not going to be able to survive it much longer," she said.

The 1 percent of the U.S. population in uniform are the ones fighting and paying the most, Thomas said.

If people really wanted to support the troops, they would be fighting for them to come home, she added.

Contact Amanda Kim Stairrett at astair@kdhnews.com or (254) 501-7547. Follow her on Twitter at KDHmilitary or www.facebook.com/astairrett.

For more information

Under the Hood is located at 17 S. College St. It is open daily from 5 to 10 p.m. Visit the café online at www.underthehoodcafe.org.

For more information about Texas Labor Against the War, visit www.txlaboragainstwar.org or call (512) 470-8485.

To learn more about Wasfi and her work, visit www.liberatethis.com. To read her prepared remarks about the war's effect on the Iraqi people, visit www.kdhnews.com.

photo from Killeen Daily Herald

Charlie Clements, Veteran for Peace

This weekend, Veterans for Peace is marking its 25th anniversary during its annual meeting, held this year in Maine, where the first VFP chapter was formed.

It was good to see this article, published today in the Maine Sunday Telegram, featuring VFP member, Charlie Clements. I remember hearing Mr. Clements speak here in Austin at the Friends Meeting House years ago -- sometime in the late 1980's, I believe. He was working at great personal risk as a medical doctor in El Salvador. He wrote about the experience in his book, Witness to War. Hearing Charlie Clements speak was part of my own awakening to the realities of US foreign policy.

Here's today's article:

Activist's personal journey stretches from battlefield to protest march

by Bill Nemitz


How does a soldier become a peace activist? For Charlie Clements, the answer lies somewhere between the lines of a 40-year-old military document that he keeps to this day.

“It says I’m 10 percent mentally disabled,” Clements said with a smile last week. “My protest was quite a silent one in some ways – I went quietly into the night.”

Clements, 64, is executive director of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School.

He’s also one of 300 or so military veterans who will march through Portland’s Old Port this morning to mark the 25th anniversary of Veterans for Peace, which has grown to more than 6,000 members nationwide since its founding here in Maine back in 1985.

Military service does different things to different people.

Some wear it for a lifetime as a badge of honor, weaving their war stories more deeply into their very identity with each retelling.

Others tuck it away in the closet and rarely, if ever, talk about it again.

Then there are these vets, almost all decades removed from their days in uniform, who spend their gray-haired years marching not to the sound of a military band, but rather to the lyrics of anti-war protest songs.

Each, of course, has his or her own story. For Clements, once an Air Force pilot who flew more than 50 missions in Southeast Asia before deciding one day he couldn’t anymore, it begins as a 17-year-old cadet at the U.S. Air Force Academy in the mid-1960s.

“The dominant thought in my class was, ‘We hope the war doesn’t end before we get there,’ ” Clements recalled as the Veterans for Peace conference got under way Thursday. “Because wars are where young men test themselves, they are where young officers make their mark, they are what we were trained for.”

Upon earning his commission as a second lieutenant, Clements enrolled with the Air Force’s blessing in a graduate astronautics program at UCLA. He could have sat out the Vietnam War with his nose in a book, but he decided eight months into the program that he had a duty to serve in Southeast Asia.

He remembers walking in uniform past protesters at UCLA in the fall of 1967 – back in those early days of the anti-war movement, the protesters would just stand silently with their signs while he and his comrades passed by.

“I remember thinking very clearly that I knew much more about the world than these people did, that this was their right to do this,” he said. “And that I would go to Vietnam and defend their right to do this because I have a better understanding of this threat that faces us.”

CHOSE TO PILOT TRANSPORT PLANE

He also knew he didn’t want to kill anyone. So, upon graduating from flight school, he chose to pilot a C-130 transport plane rather than an assault aircraft and, with the war at full tilt, departed for Vietnam in August of 1969.

“What (the C-130) afforded me was a vast opportunity to see the war from different perspectives,” Clements said. “And with these experiences, I began to have encounters that gradually lifted the scales off my eyes.”

He once watched then-President Richard Nixon insist on the Armed Forces Network that the United States had no military presence in Laos, when he knew for a fact that C-130s just like the one he flew were ferrying personnel and supplies to secret U.S. bases there.

“Before that, it had never occurred to me before that the president would actually go on television and lie,” Clements said.

He once transported a group of 60 Viet Cong prisoners from one location to another – he was struck not just by the hatred in their eyes whenever they looked at him, but by an intensity, a sense of purpose that he rarely saw among young American GI’s.

GETTING THE BODY COUNT RIGHT

He once showed up at a morgue to pick up the body of a soldier killed in action. “You can’t have him today,” a sergeant told him. “The body count’s not right and we have to hang onto him for a few days.”

Known for his sharp intellect, Clements once was asked by his higher-ups to write a history of the Low Altitude Parachute Extraction System by which C-130s delivered ordnance and supplies without actually touching down. The so-called LAPES procedure didn’t work well. That didn’t matter.

“I soon realized they were going to record this the way the Air Force wanted it recorded,” he said. “Not necessarily the way the pilots perceived it was happening,”

Then there was Cambodia.

In the spring of 1970, Clements flew a top-secret delegation of State Department officials to Phnom Penh – he was told at the time it was for an off-the-record meeting about securing a portion of the Ho Chi Minh Trail that passed through that country.

Only later would Clements learn the meeting was actually to plan the overthrow of Cambodia’s Prince Sihanouk – a precursor to the invasion of Cambodia launched that May. As he flew troops into Cambodia the day before the invasion began, he found himself consumed with anger.

“I’d had this rationale that I wasn’t killing anybody, that I was an innocent of sorts,” he said. “But throughout that day I began to understand that I was very much a part of the machinery of war, that I was greasing the skids of war. And I decided what I was being asked to do was immoral.”

He asked for and received an emergency medical leave home. And when he told his stateside commanding officer that he could no longer fly missions in Southeast Asia, he was sent to an Army medical facility for what he thought was a routine psychiatric examination.

Upon his arrival, a hospital nurse handed Clements a set of pajamas.

“No, you don’t understand,” he said. “I’m staying over at the officers quarters.”

“No, you’re staying here,” replied the nurse. “This is a closed psychiatric ward and you’re not leaving.”

There he remained, without visitors or telephone privileges, for weeks. And six months later, after refusing an offer to have his record sanitized if he’d just go back to Saigon and resume flying, the Air Force quietly declared him 10 percent mentally disabled and gave him an honorable discharge.

PUTS MEDICAL SKILLS TO USE

Clements would go on to become a physician and combine his medical skills with human rights work in Central America, where he spent the early 1980s treating victims of the civil war in El Salvador (many wounded by the same U.S. military aircraft in which he once trained). It was there, in 1985, that he met and joined the founders of Veterans for Peace.

He also later served as president of Physicians for Human Rights, traveling to Sweden in 1997 to accept the organization’s Nobel Peace Prize for its efforts to ban land mines.

And now here he is in Maine, one of a small battalion of gray-haired veterans who emerged from war convinced that there has to be a better way.

Clements knows that some perceive Veterans for Peace as a ragtag group of radicals bent on tearing down the same country they once took an oath to protect. He also knows that perception could not be further from the truth.

Even now, he said, he has nothing but “empathy and respect” for those currently serving in the military – not to mention the families who have endured two, three, four or more deployments to Iraq or Afghanistan.

“I think our military is, more than ever in my lifetime, separated from the rest of society,” Clements said. “There’s a gulf between the ordinary civilians in our country and the military. We’re fighting two wars, but nobody (outside the military and their families) feels like they’re making any sacrifices.”

Time will tell whether the aging Vietnam veterans who now dominate Veterans for Peace will be replenished in the coming years with soldiers equally disillusioned by their service in Iraq or Afghanistan. Clements’ experience tells him the transition from the battlefield to the protest march often takes years, not weeks or months.

He’s also come to expect that as he and his comrades parade through downtown Portland this morning, some on the sidelines inevitably will call them a disgrace to the uniform they once wore.

But that piece of paper – the one that all these years later still labels him 10 percent out of step with the powers that once were – leaves him no choice.

“You don’t do this because of what people will think,” Clements said with another anything-but-angry smile. “You do this because of something inside you that compels you to speak your truth.”

photo by Derek Davis, published in the Maine Sunday Telegram

Life Stories

This past week, I traveled to Michigan for a family get-together. There were 15 of us, ranging in age from 9 to 85, and we are a family that likes to play games of various kinds. Some years ago, a friend gave me the board game, "Life Stories," which she had ordered from the Fellowship of Reconciliation bookstore. I have used this game in a number of social settings, and I've always learned something.

As my brother says, "Life Stories" is not so much a game as an 'encounter group.' Players move tokens around a board and draw cards that ask players to talk briefly about their own life experiences. On several occasions, I have brought this game along when I've done child care, just to see if children would be interested in it, and in every case, they have been -- even kids as young as 5 or 6 years old. It's a non-competitive oral history exercise that draws people together. In my experience, it even works well with just two people playing.

Here are some sample "Life Stories" cards:

Tell about one of the proudest moments in your life.

What is an activity that makes you feel ALIVE?

Tell about something you really like about where you live.

Describe one of the best decisions you made in your life.

What is a habit you picked up from a relative?

Tell about an aroma you recall from childhood.

I think the questions on the cards are phrased very well, and, as expected, they can lead to tangential discussions where others share their memories about the subject at hand.

When my family played the game this week, not all the adults wanted to play, but the children did, so even the adults who weren't "playing" stayed close by and sometimes chimed in. Even when we think we know our own family members pretty well, the game can teach us things about each other.

When my mom drew the card about an aroma from childhood, she recalled that when she was young and their family drove to Maine (from New Jersey) for vacation, they would sniff the air as they crossed into Maine and smell the sweet-fern, which, she said, always seemed to occur right at the border. She said she and her brothers would call out, "sweet-fern!" Vacation had begun.


I was thinking about the song, "From a Distance," which suggests that, as people in conflict around the world, we could learn to respect and cherish each other better if we took the long view. "From a distance, you look like my friend." For me, it begins from the other direction -- moving in, not out. The more closely I look at a person's life, the more I can understand where they are coming from. That's the premise of the "Life Stories" game, and it works for me!

The game can be ordered at this site. Check it out!

photo of sweet-fern by Dennis Curtin

Peace through play

This weekend, members of Iraq Veterans Against the War organized and held their first independent convention since their founding in 2004, and they chose Austin as their host city. Lucky for us! Our CodePink group provided the childcare for the convention, and I enjoyed the opportunity to be part of the convention in this way.

I spent most of my time at the convention with the children. We did free play, with a sort of "Adventure Playground" approach, where the children had basic materials with which to build and create things of their choosing. The convention was held at Huston-Tillotson University, and we had a standard classroom as the childcare room -- bare linoleum floor covered with about 20 heavy student chair/desks. Provided with sheets, blankets, paper, yarn, tape, clothespins, markers, paper blocks, books and a few other basic materials, the kids made use of the desks to create an inviting "fort" area that expanded throughout the weekend and led to various other projects they dreamed up. As always, with some basic adult guidance and support, kids will weave a world of marvelous invention.

Perhaps this is the underlying philosophy that leads me to reject militarism, occupation and war. If people have their basic needs met -- adequate and healthy food, water, health care, creative outlets -- then, generally, they (we) will thrive. Most people know what is best for themselves and will grow in healthy ways if given half a chance. Human powers of creation and invention are great. Why channel any of our inventive resources into such hugely destructive things as predator drones, cluster bombs, landmines, IEDs, automatic rifles?

In addition to the time with the children, the weekend was filled, for me, with meaningful, if brief, encounters with several of the veterans and invited guests to the convention, all of whom seemed to reinforce this essential message. As longtime friend, nonviolent activist, author and teacher, Kathy Kelly, said during her panel presentation, "If you want to counter terror, build justice." Justice begins with the building blocks of simple, elemental conditions that children need to grow and prosper.

Photos: IVAW member, Joe Wheeler and his daughters, Lily and Ivy (with one of the paper outfits she designed)