War

SODaPOP Adds Fizz to Anti-War Movement

Posted February 27th, 2008 by pa
in
Subtitle:
Chicago Group Confronts Presidential Candidates
Author Name:
Paul Abowd
Intro:
Over a year after Democrats took control of Congress on a still unfulfilled anti-war mandate, Chicago-based Voices for Creative Nonviolence (VCNV) is one of many groups calling for a transformation of American foreign policy.

 

Buttressed by mass opposition to the war and unable to find real leadership from above, the Chicago group traveled to Iowa for caucus week, where they launched a civil disobedience campaign called “Seasons of Discontent: A Presidential Occupation Project”, or SODaPOP.
 
Throughout this election season, SODaPOP members will be in campaign offices making demands that no major candidate will likely agree to. In Des Moines, they asked candidates to support a complete withdrawal of troops from Iraq and Afghanistan within 100 days after they take office, as well as an end to sanctions on Iran and plans for military action against that country, and a commitment to fully fund the reconstruction of Iraq. The activists are refusing to leave the campaign offices until they receive some assurances. Fifteen were arrested in Iowa, and in the process they revealed the discomfort among so-called “anti-war” candidates with the anti-war movement.
 
These acts of civil disobedience express both hope and despair; they reject an unresponsive corporate democracy while appealing to its leaders for support. Jeff Leys reconciles this tension: “We have to use every non-violent lever at our disposal."We need to do this extra-legal work as an extension of the necessary work of participation.” Leys spent the week in Des Moines campaign offices and at the organization precinct.
 
After arrests at Guliani headquarters, another wave of protests hit the Clinton campaign, which literally shut the door on the debate. Four protesters risked arrest and tried to enter, but ended up protesting outside the locked office until it closed for the day. On New Year’s Eve, a sea of cameras crowded the doors of Huckabee campaign headquarters, where three more protesters inquired of the reverend: “Who would Jesus bomb?”
 
One of these protesters was Kathy Kelly, a tireless veteran of the peace movement. The day after her arrest at Huckabee headquarters, she appeared on C-SPAN from Des Moines, where the anchor went through her lengthy bio. She has been to Iraq dozens of times, and was in Baghdad during the initial “shock and awe” bombings 2003. “I was with children (in Iraq) who were so terrified they began to grind their teeth, morning, noon and night,” she says. A hostile Iraq war veteran called in to inquire as to whether she was from this planet, where we face Islamic radicalism. Kelly was calm: “When you hear children crying in pain, you have a different experience of the effect of bombs being dropped from 30,000 feet in the air.”
 
Kelly has served jail time for planting corn at a nuclear missile site in the 1980’s and more recently for her protest at Fort Benning, the infamous home of the formerly-named School of the Americas (a training school for members of the military in various Central American, Latin American, and Caribbean nations, notorious for training military personnel that went on to commit human rights abuses). She stands by her decades-long refusal to pay federal income taxes: “In my conscience I simply cannot contribute toward the arsenal that the U.S. has developed, stored, and used.” Kelly continues to lead, even if it means breaking the law, so that elected officials might follow: “When you take this kind of risk, you’re in a better position to ask lawmakers to themselves take a political risk.”
 
For months, members of the Chicago community have asked Senator Obama to take this risk – not just to end the war, but to change priorities. Says Kelly: “There’s such an opportunity for leadership amongst the Democrats to educate Americans about the consequences of this war, and about what could be done with the money that would be voted to fund ongoing wars.” They met up again with the campaign in Des Moines to ask for Obama’s support. The response from the office of a candidate running on his anti-war credentials revealed not just hostility, but a coordinated attempt to marginalize the anti-war message.
 
About a dozen protesters entered, wrapped in kaffiyas and carrying banners and pictures of Iraqis they’ve met in their travels. Obama’s people moved swiftly to remove members of the press, claiming that space had to be made for visitors at the front entrance, which was then promptly locked. A sign was posted, directing visitors to the back entrance away from the protest. The media soon faded from the ongoing scene inside. With the red, white and blue Obama “O” as his backdrop, John Tuzcu, a member of the Des Moines Catholic Worker, read from the Illinois candidate’s plan to leave tens of thousands of troops in Iraq through his first term.
 
The campaign staff quietly evacuated the main room, in protest of the protest. Brian Terrell, 51, read from Martin Luther King Jr.’s speech on Vietnam from April 1967, “Beyond Vietnam”: “A time comes when silence is betrayal!” Obama’s people whispered in each other’s ears, then directed the police to steer the protest out the side door.
 
Kelly saw firsthand Bill Clinton’s war on Iraq that destroyed the country’s infrastructure with protracted military and economic warfare. She organized dozens of delegations to the country, bringing medicine and medical supplies to Iraqi hospitals drained by the sanctions imposed by Britain and the United States. Her actions were in direct violation of US law, punishable by a $1 million fine and jail time.
The delegation members made it clear to Janet Reno’s office that they would go anyway. She was standing beside malnourished children in hospitals without electricity, clean water, or medicine. The infant mortality rate had doubled since sanctions began in 1990, and UNICEF concluded that the twelve-year war killed nearly 500,000 children under the age of five. Kelly watched as this story too was ushered silently out the side door.
 
With this awareness, Leys is giving equal scrutiny to the liberal field, concerned that campaigns of ‘change’ might result in more of the same. “The biggest danger is that Democrats are normalizing the idea of partial withdrawal, and disarming the anti-war movement to the idea of residual troop levels,” he says.
 
The SODaPOP organizers are pushing for withdrawal, not just from Iraq, but also from a failed strategy that diverts public funds for a highly militarized global presence. And Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, who together have caved on numerous funding bills without strings attached, can no longer shrug and complain about lacking the votes. Leys argues they need to be winning those votes: “I’m talking about keep the Senate in session for 30 days. Make it abundantly clear who is keeping the war going, maybe that would shake loose a few moderate Republicans.”
 
The VCNV project is about citizens’ reclamation of the political process, and reclamation of funds better used for the common good. Leys sees the impact of the war effort on public services in Chicago: “The state government is on doomsday number three for mass transit funding. Fares might be doubled in the next few weeks, and the suburbs are already cutting their routes and services into the city.”
 
The slogging war brings its effects home, sparking a rise in civil resistance actions nationwide in the last year. In Olympia, WA the Port Militarization Resistance project held demonstrations in November to impede the shipment of military equipment from their city’s ports. Groups of college students linked arms in front of semi-trucks carrying tanks destined for Iraq. Riot police doused them repeatedly at point blank range with tear gas, but days later, more were back at the port. Eighty more protesters in orange jumpsuits were arrested on the Supreme Court steps in January, calling for the closure of the prison camp at Guantanamo Bay.
 
And though the SODaPOP campaign directs pressure upon leaders, it also seeks to build networks of resistance. Says Leys, “These actions are an invitation or challenge, or both, to the anti-war movement to intensify the opposition to this war.” To this end, the Voices website contains a network of local organizations carrying out civil resistance actions nationwide.
 
After each arrest, the campaign offices continued to hum, the semis delivered the tank to the port, and Guantanamo remained open. But each arrest makes it clear that Americans won’t accept these realities willingly. And Leys hopes that more voices will create a more powerful culture of protest. “We need to acknowledge that we haven’t done enough yet to build up anti-war sentiment and pressure Congress.” Robert Braam, one of the protesters arrested in Des Moines, called the discontented to action. “Only thing we did wrong? Stayed in the Wilderness too long. Only thing we did right? The day we stood up to fight!”
 
 
Learn more about Voices for Creative Nonviolence and find a local organization carrying out protest actions at their website; www.vcnv.org.
Bio:
Paul Abowd is a Labor Notes intern and a member of the Critical Moment editorial collective.

Of Barracks and Prisons

Posted October 11th, 2007 by max
in
Author Name:
Gaurav Jashnani
Intro:
Rape, child abuse, disaster, war, police violence and long-term poverty: psychological trauma arrives in many forms, but its effects share a frightening commonality. In its man-made manifestations, such as the systematic use of rape and torture in times of war, trauma is-- fundamentally--about disempowerment. Traumatic experiences can disrupt or even destroy people's lives in a moment, shattering their sense of security and well-being, undermining their understanding of who they are or their very bodily integrity. Often times, the lack of support and resources available to trauma survivors takes them from bad to worse, preventing them from rebuilding a stable sense of safety, autonomy and even identity.

Particularly with such purposefully inflicted trauma, an effort is made by the perpetrators to sweep the consequences under the proverbial rug, to hide the real impact of human violence and violation. This is even more the case with institutions that are wholly designed to inflict trauma and reap disempowerment on a global scale, such as the US military establishment. We should thus find it unsurprising that while such an institution shirks responsibility for the torture and terror it sows across occupied lands like Iraq, it would also leave behind casualties of trauma within its own ranks.

Bryan's trauma

Bryan Dammon Smith, a Detroit native, is a decorated and disabled veteran as well as husband and father of four. For fifteen years he has suffered from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), as well as physical disabilities, as a result of his military service; he is currently awaiting trial on capital charges in San Diego, California, scheduled for October.

Growing up, Bryan succeeded in most everything he tried his hand at ? he was a natural leader, always working to improve himself and strengthen his community. Among his many achievements, he was elected class president in high school, competed in the Junior Olympics and was a Reserve Officers Training Core (ROTC) Major. Rather than attend college ? and over the objections of his family ? he decided to join the Marines after high school. Showing immediate promise, he soon received official commendations from his superiors.

During a Special Forces training operation in June 1992, tragedy struck by way of an equipment failure. Eight months into his military service, Bryan fell sixty feet down a cliff and landed head and shoulders first; his back broke in four places, and his knees and legs were severely damaged. He stayed in the Marines for a year afterward, slowly recuperating, working for the chaplain and organizing a regimental choir that performed for the larger community. He was discharged in 1993 after being declared only partially disabled, thus limiting his compensation and access to healthcare. And, like many other veterans, he was left without the job training or resources to make the necessary transition back to civilian life.

Bryan's personality changed deeply after the fall, and seven years afterward he was diagnosed with severe Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) induced by his accident. Yet it took eleven years from the time of his fall for him to be given full disability, and in the meantime, he suffered from a bevy of symptoms such as continuous pain, severe memory loss, insomnia, nightmares and migraines. At the same time, his mental state worsened without diagnosis or treatment. Despite his physical and psychological wounds, he was expected by those responsible for his accident to fend for himself.

In 1994, Bryan ? who had no previous criminal record ? was arrested and charged with drug and weapons possession (the latter for carrying his Marines-issue billy club in the trunk of his car). He spent nearly nine years in and out of correctional facilities, sent back three times for violating his parole. Each time, he did so by travelling to Detroit, visiting his family and trying to reconstruct his memory and his life.

After getting off of parole in California, Bryan moved back to Detroit to be near his family. He remarried and worked hard to pull his life together, finally receiving disability. In late 2005, he was extradited from Michigan to face charges of felony murder from a 1994 San Diego robbery, in which Tayser El Farra was killed while working at his convenience store. The state of California omitted any mention of the death penalty from their extradition request to the state of Michigan, where the death penalty has never been used and was banned in 1846. This omission perhaps occurred because mention of capital punishment might have led to a request for non-capital charges against Bryan prior to his extradition, based on Michigan Governor Granholm's stated strong opposition to the death penalty.

Now, Bryan awaits his October trial date in a San Diego jail, and may very well be sentenced to death if found guilty. The Defense Committee to Free Bryan Smith is not debating the facts of the case at present; we are asking that, rather than the death penalty, he face charges that will result in "life without the benefit of parole" if found guilty. As demonstrated by numerous studies and a pending class action suit in San Diego County, death penalty juries are disproportionately white, male and 'trigger-happy,' with an acquittal rate of only five percent on death penalty cases in that county. We first want out of that mess, and then we can begin to talk about justice.

The Larger Picture

Bryan's trauma was the result of a training accident, but there are tens of thousands of US soldiers and contractors who will soon be returning home from Iraq and Afghanistan, damaged by things they have seen and done. They will need emotional support, therapy, job training and enormous efforts to help them integrate themselves back into society; the Defense Committee hopes to encourage long-term organizing around issues of trauma and recovery, as these needs require resources that we must both demand from the government and organize to provide ourselves as communities. We are up against a system that trains its soldiers to inflict violence ? leaving them traumatized in addition to the targeted communities ? and then drops them back into civilian life without the skills and resources they need.

Beyond Bryan's plight, this is also a fight against larger social injustices, faced by millions of Americans: an appalling insistence on clinging to capital punishment in a world that has largely left it behind; insufficient resources and re-training for veterans, regardless of their ranking; a lack of access to adequate care for physical and mental health issues; and an ongoing genocide in the United States, where communities of color are broken over and over again in hopes that someday they will finally give up and disappear.

If you want to help us resist the government's insistence that it can deny our loved ones their right to exist, please ? talk to members of your community about Bryan's situation. Anyone is invited to help in any way they can, and we are already working with a number of church groups, veterans' organizations, people of color community organizations, progressive/radical groups, and various other groups and individuals. We are currently seeking financial assistance to help pay for the phone calls and copies that make up our day-to-day work, as well as transportation and lodging costs for Sandra, Bryan's mother, who will be travelling to San Diego in the fall and staying about two months for the duration of the jury selection and trial. Any suggestions or other offers of help are much appreciated; checks should be made out to:

The Defense Committee to Free Bryan Smith

P.O. Box 44474

Detroit, MI 48244

We are also asking that those who wish to help write to the San Diego District Attorney, Bonnie M. Dumanis, and ask her to take the death penalty off the table. We encourage supporters of Bryan to contact certain elected representatives in Michigan; ask them to call for non-capital charges for Bryan Smith, a disabled and decorated Michigan veteran suffering from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. Remind them that no one deserves the death penalty!

Trauma functions by shattering individual lives and whole communities, and then leaving behind the pieces. We need your help to prevent the possible murder of a mentally ill veteran, a man who had a bright future snatched away from him in the midst of his youth. We invite community members and activists everywhere to join us in this appeal, and to insist that the death penalty does not bring justice to anyone.

Bio:
Gaurav Jashnani is a member of the Defense Committee to Free Bryan Smith. He is also living in New York, where he manages a farmers market, seeks other radical people of color to work with, and misses Michelle and Michigan.

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