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kathy kelly
To Secure Lasting Peace in Afghanistan, Task Force Proposes Prolonging Longest US War
"This recommendation is a practical guarantee that U.S. troops will be in Afghanistan until the sun explodes," said one expert.
Feb 02, 2021
In order to achieve a lasting peace in Afghanistan, the United States needs to keep waging its longest-ever war there. That's the encapsulated conclusion of a report published Wednesday by the Afghanistan Study Group, a congressionally mandated task force that is recommending the Biden administration keep U.S. troops in the war-torn nation beyond the May 1 deadline set under former President Donald Trump.
"Military officials agree there is no military solution, so keeping a few thousand U.S. troops in the country... makes no sense strategically."
-- Phyllis Bennis,
Institute for Policy Studies
According to the study group--a 15-member bipartisan panel led by former Sen. Kelly Ayotte (R-N.H.), former Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Joseph Dunford, and former United States Institute for Peace CEO Nancy Lindborg--the Taliban has not met the prerequisite conditions for the withdrawal of the remaining 2,500 U.S. troops in the country.
"The study group... believes that it will be very difficult, and perhaps impossible, for those conditions to be achieved by May 2021," the report states. "Achieving the overall objective of a negotiated stable peace that meets U.S. interests would need to begin with securing an extension of the May deadline."
The conditions, established during the talks that led to the February 2020 Doha agreement between the Trump administration and the Taliban, include reducing violence, severing ties with al-Qaeda militants, and engaging in intra-Afghan talks. Under the agreement, the U.S. committed (pdf) to reducing the number of forces in Afghanistan from 13,000 to 8,600 within 135 days, with a complete withdrawal within 14 months.
However, "complete withdrawal" is a misnomer, says Phyllis Bennis, director of the New Internationalism Project at the Institute for Policy Studies, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank.
"No one is talking about withdrawing the U.S. bombers and drones that are responsible for so much civilian suffering," Bennis told Common Dreams. "By calling them 'counter-terrorism operations,' it seems those airstrikes and drone attacks are completely off the withdrawal agenda."
The 2,500 U.S. troops Trump left in Afghanistan just before President Joe Biden took office were the fewest that have been there since the United States invaded Afghanistan in retaliation for the then-ruling Taliban's harboring of Osama bin Laden and the al-Qaeda militants who attacked the U.S. on September 11, 2001. At the peak of former President Barack Obama's "Afghan surge" in 2011, there were over 100,000 U.S. troops in the country.
The war, currently in its 20th year, is now a multi-generational conflict for both the Afghan civilians who endure its terrors and those who inflict them. That includes Afghan government forces, Taliban and other militants, and U.S. and allied troops--some of whose parents also fought there.
The cost in blood and treasure has been tremendous. More than 100,000 Afghans civilians were killed by all sides in the years 2010-2020 alone, according to the United Nations. Taliban militants have killed the most noncombatants, but thousands of men, women, and children have also been killed by U.S., coalition, and Afghan government bombs and bullets. The Trump administration's 2017 decision to loosen military rules of engagement meant to protect noncombatants was followed by a 330% surge in civilian deaths since the end of the Obama administration, according to the Brown University Watson Institute's Costs of War Project.
Millions of Afghans have also been displaced by the decades of fighting.
The total U.S. price tag for the war is estimated at over $1.5 trillion, with hundreds of billions of dollars more spent on reconstruction, economic development, training and equipping Afghan security forces, and counternarcotics operations.
"Billions were spent to prolong the war, enabling vast profits for military contractors, various warlords, and mafiosa-style groups that often gained control over foreign funds."
--Kathy Kelly,
peace activist
However, critics say that after all that war, the U.S. cannot buy peace in Afghanistan. That, says U.S. peace activist Kathy Kelly, "will require finding jobs and incomes for desperate people [and] also require finding ways to greatly reduce the power of various warlords who have profited through prolonged warfare."
"It's important to reckon with the reality that billions were spent to prolong the war, enabling vast profits for military contractors, various warlords, and mafiosa-style groups that often gained control over foreign funds," Kelly told Common Dreams. "Equivalent sums should be directed toward reparations that would enable Afghanistan to rehabilitate its agricultural infrastructure and provide work and income for people."
"Young Afghan friends regularly tell me that they can't find work unless they are willing to work for a military group," Kelly added.
While progress has been made in Afghan civil society and other areas, the Afghan government remains one of the world's most corrupt, and Afghan military and police forces are plagued by human rights violations, while remaining incapable of defeating the Taliban and other insurgents.
In recent days and weeks, reports of widespread torture (pdf) in Afghan prisons and of U.S.-backed military death squads underscore the yawning chasm between the U.S. government's vision for Afghanistan and the stark reality there--a reality for which there is no military solution.
"U.S. troops weren't able to protect Afghans or prevent Taliban attacks when they were deployed in the tens of thousands--they just caused more casualties with their own actions," said Bennis. "Military officials agree there is no military solution, so keeping a few thousand U.S. troops in the country... makes no sense strategically."
Stephen Miles, executive director of the peace advocacy group Win Without War, agrees.
"The word for spending another minute trying to 'win' on the battlefield after the last two decades isn't 'logic,' it's absurdity."
--Stephen Miles,
Win Without War
"The word for spending another minute trying to 'win' on the battlefield after the last two decades isn't 'logic'--it's absurdity," Miles told Common Dreams via email. "In a situation where everyone agrees that the challenges we face do not have military solutions, only in Washington can the solution be to keep using the U.S. military."
"The future of Afghanistan must be up to Afghans," he added, "and while the United States has a moral obligation to help rebuild what we've spent decades breaking, the Biden administration should also listen to the U.S. public that has been crystal clear that they want the United States' longest war to finally and fully end."
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The Wounds of War in Afghanistan
Recovering from a broken hip, the author reflects on her experiences with people disabled and traumatized by war.
Sep 28, 2019
Its economy gutted by war, Afghanistan's largest cash crop remains opium. Yet farmers there do grow other crops for export. Villagers in the Wazir Tangi area of Nangarhar province, for example, cultivate pine nuts. As a precaution, this year at harvest time, village elders notified the governor of the province that they would be bringing in migrant workers to help them collect the nuts. Hired laborers, including children, would camp out in the pine nut forests, they informed the officials. They hoped their letter could persuade U.S. and ISIS forces, which had been fighting in or near their villages, not to attack.
On September 17, 2019, exhausted from a long day of work, the migrant workers reached their rest spot for the night, and began building fires and making camp. In the early hours of the following morning, a U.S. drone attacked, killing at least thirty-two people. More than forty others were wounded. The U.S. military claims that ISIS fighters were hiding among the farmers who were killed.
I followed this story while recuperating from surgery after breaking my hip on a train from Chicago to Washington, D.C. Before the train even reached the first stop out of Chicago, kindly emergency services workers had bundled me off to the Memorial South Bend hospital. I was well cared for, and now a physical therapist is already helping me with movement and exercise.
I read about the laborers who survived the attack on the pine nut forest. According to Haidar Khan, the owner of the pine nut trees, about 150 workers were there for harvesting, and some are still missing. One survivor described people asleep in tents pitched near the farm when the attack happened. "Some of us managed to escape, some were injured but many were killed," said Juma Gul, a resident of northeastern Kunar province and one of the migrant workers who had travelled to harvest and shell pine nuts
I can't help but wonder: Where are the missing? What care was available for wounded survivors? How many were children? Did a nearby facility offer X-rays, surgery, medications, clean bandages, prostheses, walkers, crutches, nourishing food and physical therapy?
I remember on visits to Afghanistan watching disabled victims of war in the capital city of Kabul as they struggled along unpaved roads, using battered crutches or primitive prostheses. They were coming to collect free duvets being distributed to people who otherwise might not survive the harsh winter weather. Their bodies so clearly bore the brunt of war.
In Kabul, earlier this month, my twenty-one-year-old friend Muhammad Ali reminded me of the importance of asking questions. Wanting me and others to understand more about the impact of war on his generation, he prodded: "Kathy, do you know about Jehanzib, Saboor, Qadeer, and Abdul, these brothers who were killed in Jalalabad?"
The brothers, ranging from twenty-four to thirty years of age, were killed by an Afghan "strike force" trained by the CIA, according to the news. In Jalalabad, two of them worked for the government and two ran their own businesses. The squad that entered their homes beat them severely and then killed them.
"They were kind and humble people, anyone who knew them loved the boys."
Family and friends felt sure the brothers had no links to militias. "They were kind and humble people, anyone who knew them loved the boys," Naqeeb Sakhizada, who owns a shop in the area and knew the brothers for more than ten years, told Al Jazeera."They cared for people and also had a good sense of humor."
In her WWI memoir, Testament of Youth, Vera Brittain wrote about volunteering as a nurse toward the end of WWI. Her clinic, in France, received European soldiers from the western front who arrived mutilated, maimed, exhausted and traumatized. One day, she thought she must be imagining the line of soldiers who marched past the clinic tents looking robust, upright and well fed. Then she realized they were from the United States.
New recruits come, and the war machine grinds on.
Looking forward, perhaps we won't see so many lines of U.S. soldiers marching through villages and cities in Afghanistan. A soldier operating a drone can continue the United States mission from afar.
We must still bear in mind Vera Brittain's pertinent comments about the realities of war:
"I have only one wish in life now and that is for the ending of the War. I wonder how much really all you have seen and done has changed you. Personally, after seeing some of the dreadful things I have to see here, I feel I shall never be the same person again, and wonder if, when the War does end, I shall have forgotten how to laugh. The other day I did involuntarily laugh at something and it felt quite strange. Some of the things in our ward are so horrible . . . one day last week I came away from a really terrible amputation dressing I had been assisting at--it was the first after the operation--with my hands covered with blood and my mind full of a passionate fury at the wickedness of war, and I wished I had never been born."
I look forward to going on with my life, once I recover from this broken hip. I can only imagine Vera Brittain's overwhelming ordeal. And I can only imagine the trauma of a child laborer awakened by an aerial attack in a pine nut forest, racing through the trees in hopes of escape, and perhaps surviving in great pain without a limb, or missing a brother, or wishing he had never been born.
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Defying War and Defining Peace in Afghanistan
Since 2001, and at a cost of $800 billion, the U.S. military has caused irreparable and horrific losses in Afghanistan
Jan 28, 2019
On January 27th, 2019, the Taliban and the U.S. government each publicly stated acceptance, in principle, of a draft framework for ongoing negotiations that could culminate in a peace deal to end a two-decade war in Afghanistan.
As we learn more about the negotiations, it's important to remember others working toward dialogue and negotiation in Afghanistan. Troublingly, women's rights leaders have not, thus far, been invited to the negotiating table. But several have braved potential persecution to assert the importance of including women in any framework aiming to create peace and respect human rights.
A young medical graduate student told me she was deprived of schooling during the Taliban era. "If government doesn't protect women's basic rights," she said, "we could lose access to health care and education."
"We in the U.S. have much to learn from Afghan women human rights advocates and the People's Peace Movement regarding the futility of war."
"The war was started by men, the war will be ended by men," an aide to Rula Ghani, the wife of President Ashraf Ghani, recently told a Reuters reporter. "But it's the women and children who suffer the most and they have a right to define peace." In 2018, the UN expressed alarm at the increased use of airstrikes by U.S. and Afghan forces which caused a rising death toll among women and children. In the run-up to the past week of negotiations and even during the negotiations, attacks and counter attacks between the warring parties killed dozens of civilians, including women and children. Both the Taliban and the U.S. seemed intent on showing strength and leverage by demonstrating their willingness to slaughter the innocent.
Another group not represented at the negotiating table is the "People's Peace Movement." Beginning in May of 2018, they chose a path which pointedly eschews attacks, revenge or retaliation. Following deadly attacks in their home province of Helmand, initiators of this movement humbly walked, sometimes even barefoot, hundreds of miles, asking people to reject the entire institution of war. They've urged an end to revenge and retaliation and called on all warring parties to support a peace process. Their journeys throughout the country have become venues for informal hearings, allowing opportunity for people to collectively imagine abolishing war.
We in the U.S. have much to learn from Afghan women human rights advocates and the People's Peace Movement regarding the futility of war.
Since 2001, and at a cost of $800 billion, the U.S. military has caused irreparable and horrific losses in Afghanistan. Afghan civilians have endured invasion, occupation, aerial bombings, ground attacks, drone warfare, extensive surveillance, internal displacement, soaring refugee populations, environmental degradation and the practice of indefinite detention and torture. How would U.S. citizens bear up under even a fraction of this misery?
It stands to reason this litany of suffering would lead to increased insurgent resistance, to rising support for the Taliban, and to spiraling violence.
By late 2018, even a top military commander, Army General Scott Miller, told CNN the U.S. had no chance of a military victory in Afghanistan. He stated the fight will continue until there is a political settlement,
Danny Sjursen, an exceptionally honest Major General and author, wrote in December 2018 the only thing left for the U.S. military to do in Afghanistan was to lose.
Major General Sjursen was correct to concede inevitable U.S. military defeat in Afghanistan, but there is something more U.S. people can and should do. Namely, pay reparations for 17 years of suffering we've caused in Afghanistan. This is, as Professor Noam Chomsky once said, "what any civilized country would do."
Some might counter the U.S. has already provided over $132 billion dollars for reconstruction in Afghanistan. But, did that sum make a significant difference in the lives of Afghan people impoverished by displacement and war? I think not.
Since 2008, John Sopko, the Special Inspector General for Afghan Reconstruction, has submitted quadrennial reports to the U.S. Congress detailing ways waste, embezzlement, fraud and abuse have consistently resulted in failed reconstruction efforts. Sopko and his teams of researchers and analysts offered a chance for people in the U.S. to see ourselves as we're often seen by an increasingly cynical Afghan public. But we seldom even hear of the SIGAR reports. In fact, when President Trump heard of these watchdog reports during his first Cabinet meeting of 2019, he was infuriated and said they should be locked up!
It's telling that SIGAR was preceded by SIGIR, (the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction) which filed similarly critical yet largely unnoticed reports.
U.S. citizens often regard their country as a civilized nation that goes to war against demonic tyrants. Dr. Martin Luther King held forth a different vision. He urged us to see the humanity of other so-called enemies, to ask how we're seen by other people, and to thereby gain a needed understanding of our own weaknesses. If we could hear from other people menaced by militarism, including ours, if we could see how our wars have contributed to terrorism, corruption and authoritarianism that has turned the U.S. into a permanent warfare state, we might find the same courage that inspires brave people in Afghanistan to speak up and resist the all-encompassing tyranny of war.
We might find ourselves guided by an essential ethical question: how can we learn to live together without killing one another? If we finally grasp the terrible and ever-increasing urgency of this lesson, then we might yearn to be trusted global neighbors who humbly pay reparations rather than righteously bankroll endless wars.
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We Want Peace: Afghan Marchers Head to Kabul to Denounce War and Occupation
In march that began in Helmand and is heading to Afghan capital, walkers carry demands for end of fighting, end of U.S. occupation
Jun 11, 2018
Demanding an end to war, dozens of Afghans are making an over 400-mile trek on foot from Helmand to Kabul.
"We are tired of this war and bloodshed," Zaheer Ahmad Zindani, who was blinded in a roadside explosion, told Agence France-Presse.
The peace march to the Afghan capital followed from a protest in reaction to a deadly car bombing last month and comes amidst a declaration by Afghan president Ashraf Ghani of a temporary ceasefire with the Taliban, though not with other groups. The U.S. said it would honor it, yet ramp up attacks on the Islamic State and other militant groups in the same time period.
"We have four demands" that will be presented to Afghan leaders, said Bacha Khan Mawladad, a member of the peace convoy. "First, the warring parties should announce a ceasefire during Ramadan; second, specify an address (for peace talks), third, establish a joint government, fourth, sit together and fix a date for the withdrawal of 'foreigners' (from Afghanistan)."
At The Progressive, peace activist and author Kathy Kelly, just back from a trip to Afghanistan, recently wrote that "throngs of people in cities and towns along their route have shown solidarity with the walkers." According to AFP, citing information from organizers, "Nine people began the weeks-long anti-war march in May, but their numbers have since swollen to around 50."
Upon arriving in Ghazni, said one member of the peace group, "We were welcomed unexpectedly. Thousands of people came out. The religious scholars said in public that this is the voice of justice and the ongoing war in the country should stop." A YouTube video shows the group receiving a warm--and musical--greeting upon their arrival:
Speaking to Democracy Now! last week, Kelly said "the Helmand peace walk is very, very unusual. And I think it is bringing a measure of hope in the idea that people could assert themselves outside of the very, very, very corrupt government controls."
A federal watchdog recently declared the U.S. occupation a $5 billion failure, and the United Nations estimates that over 2,200 civilians were killed in Afghanistan as a result of armed conflict in the first three months of 2018 alone, with the deaths attributed to pro-government forces as well as extremist groups. The U.S. presence in the country, however, appears to have no end date, and President Donald Trump has doubled down on the U.S. military involvement there, fueling civilian casualties.
"I can be killed if I stay home or if I go to my shop, so I have decided it is much better to die for peace so the next generation of my family can enjoy peace," Mohammad Sarwari, who uses crutches after suffering from polio, told AFP.
Kelly urged those who have contributed to the desperate situation in Afghanistan, including the "most sophisticated and heavily armed warring party in Afghanistan...the U.S. military," to heed the group's message.
"I worry that in my country, the U.S., the dominant religion has become militarism," Kelly wrote in a column for Common Dreams on Monday. She added:
Rather than extending a hand of friendship to people in other lands and, in the case of Afghanistan, paying reparations for the terrible suffering we've caused, the U.S. continues to seek security through dominance and military might. It's a futile effort. The Helmand to Kabul peace walkers display a better means of securing peace: the path of fellowship with our neighbors on this planet, of living simply so that others might simply live, and of willingness to share, even partially, in the human hardship and precarity others face.
I hope those walking for peace, working for equality, and imploring a different way forward can be heard and celebrated not only in Afghanistan, but in every country and amongst every group that has ever caused bloodshed and ruin in Afghanistan.
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What Makes a Hate Group?
Aug 26, 2016
"As a matter of fact, you have had a person attend your protests in Camp Douglas who has threatened to kill our Deputies." This piece of startling news was revealed to me in a letter from Juneau County, Wisconsin, Undersheriff Craig Stuchlik dated July 25.
I had written to the sheriff's department requesting documents under the Open Records Law and for an explanation of the department's response to a demonstration at Volk Field, a Wisconsin Air National Guard base near the town of Camp Douglas, where my colleague at Voices for Creative Nonviolence Kathy Kelly and I had been arrested on February 23, carrying a loaf of bread and a letter for the base commander. There is a facility at this base where military personnel are trained in the operation of remotely controlled Shadow Drones that have been instrumental in the targeted assassination program that legal experts label war crimes and that military experts say recruit more enemies for our country than they kill.
Undersheriff Stuchlik put this purported threat into a broader context that suggests that the sheriff's department views Voices for Creative Nonviolence and the Wisconsin Coalition to Ground the Drones and End the Wars that organizes these demonstrations as hate groups: "Law Enforcement Officers are being targeted in the United States by hate groups because they stand for law and order. These hate groups are executing law Enforcement Officers at an alarming rate and it does not appear to be slowing down."
One of my requests concerned the department's practice of singling out of protesters' vehicles for scrutiny and frivolous citations. Stuchlik admitted that on February 23, deputies "ran" the license plate numbers of "all vehicles... that appeared to be involved in the protest," even when parked legally. "When Deputies respond to such incidents, we need to know who we are dealing with," said Stuchlik. "Thus the reason that we run license numbers. As I mentioned before, you have had a party attend your protests who has openly threatened to kill us."
My letter asked for explanations of other police responses to protests at Volk Field. Although police reports confirm that Kathy and I were arrested on open land and out of sight of any residence, the complaint that deputies swore against us in District Court fraudulently alleged that we had "entered the dwelling of Volk Field" and charged us with the crime of "trespass to a dwelling". ("Dwelling" is defined in the Wisconsin trespass statute as "a structure or that part of a structure intended to be used as a home , residence or sleeping place by one or two or more persons.") We were also charged with "disorderly conduct", even though we had no more engaged in the "violent, abusive, indecent, profane, boisterous, unreasonably loud or otherwise disorderly conduct" that this second charge is supposed to cover than we had broken into anyone's house to cause a disturbance. These phony charges were soon dropped, but not before Kathy and I were held overnight in the Juneau County Jail on $350 bonds. The county's "trespass to land" forfeiture ordinance that we were eventually cited for is not a criminal offense. Had the sheriff's department charged us properly on February 23, they would not have been able to take us to jail, but they could have only written us tickets at the site and let us go on our way.
On the day of our protest, Juneau County Sheriff Brent Oleson made a statement to the media: "Certainly anybody who wants to make a statement and protest an issue, I don't have a problem with that, but in doing so, they can't affect the rights of other individuals and that's what these individuals seem to do," he told a reporter for the local paper. "They'll protest peacefully on the side and then after some time they impede traffic and interfere with the rights of others and that's not going to be tolerated... I hope the punishments get harsher, but that remains to be seen." My Open Records Law request sought documentation of Sheriff Oleson's allegation. Still, Undersheriff Stuchlik's letter confirmed that the sheriff's department has no record indicating that protestors at Volk Field impeded traffic or interfered with the rights of others on February 23 or at any other time.
An appeal from the Coalition to meet with members of the Sheriff's Department to discuss the threats made against them has not been answered. On August 2, Undersheriff Stuchlik denied another Open Records Law request from me for information on the threat, "Because it is an ongoing investigation, the information in the investigation is not open to the public at this time. To protect the rights of the person that is being investigated, we cannot release their name." While other protestors who have attempted to enter the base peacefully with a loaf of bread have been jailed, the one who "has openly threatened to kill" deputies at the demonstrations might get off scot-free. As Stuchlik explains, "After this investigation, either the case will be closed or sent to the District Attorney's Office for possible charges... Because we are Law Enforcement, we have been threatened in the past and I am sure we will be threatened in the future. The threats come with the job."
On August 19, when I finally got to trial on the reduced charge of "trespass to land," (Kathy declined to contest the forfeiture) the whole thing took less than twenty minutes. District Attorney Mike Solovey had subpoenaed three county sheriff's deputies and a representative from Volk Field security to testify against me. Still, only one of the deputies, my own arresting officer Robb Pfaff, showed up along with Air Force Sergeant Scott Glass. The DA told my arresting officer he was unnecessary and sent him away, so Sergeant Glass was the only witness to testify. It is an unusual trial where no arresting police officer is called to the stand, especially considering that one had been present and ready.
In the narrow parameters, the court allowed, the case was open and shut. Sergeant Glass testified that he asked me to leave base property and I did not. Under my cross-examination, however, he admitted that Kathy Kelly and I did not disrupt traffic as we attempted to bring our bread and a letter to the commander. Each of the deputies who had been subpoenaed had signed statements that Sergeant Glass had told them that our actions had disrupted traffic. Two of them had sworn declarations that they had witnessed this disruption themselves. Since none of them took the stand, these discrepancies could not be challenged. Sergeant Glass' testimony was reasonable and truthful, contradicting both Sheriff Oleson's false statements to the press and his deputies' bogus reports made on the day of our arrest. The DA did not want to leave the sheriff's deputies' obvious perjuries exposed to my examination.
In my closing statement to the court, I noted that the strange strategy of keeping the police off the stand is an obvious cover for gross misconduct by the sheriff's department and that, considering the lack of evidence presented at trial, I should be found not guilty. Judge Paul Curran, quite annoyed, snapped that I was on trial for trespassing only on land and not for any other crime the police previously alleged. He found me guilty and gave me a fine of $223. I pointed out to Judge Curran that the law requires him to allow me allocution, to make a statement before passing a sentence, and that I expected to be heard. With this Judge Curran lost his temper and said that if I regretted the closing statement he had already "allowed" me to make at trial, it was too late now to take it back. The experience of drone protestors with Judge Curran is that he has his little way of abruptly ending hearings and storming out of the courtroom after making such absurd, dramatic, and puzzling nonsequiturs as this.
For more than four years, Wisconsin Coalition to Ground the Drones and End the Wars members have sponsored a monthly vigil at Volk Field. They have made many unsuccessful attempts to voice their concerns to officials at Volk Field and letters mailed to the base commander have gone unanswered. On at least three previous occasions when vigilers have attempted to walk onto the base and hand deliver their messages, base personnel have halted them in public space before they ever reached the base's front gate. On these occasions, Juneau County sheriff's deputies have arrested these protestors and transported them to the county jail on trumped up charges that have always been dismissed. Many good women and men have patiently endured the harassment of Sheriff Oleson's deputies and the derision and condescension of Judge Curran's court.
Those attending protests at Volk Field include local activists and others nationwide. Among those arrested, there have been at least one attorney, members of the clergy, several academics, healthcare professionals, and Catholic Workers. Many of these are grandparents and none has ever been accused of a crime of violence. There are no gentler and kinder people to be found anywhere. Undersheriff Stuchlik's contention that any one of us would be targeting officers for execution is absurd on many levels, not the least because our protests at Volk Field are witness against targeted assassinations in the first place. We oppose killing, threats of killing, and violence against anyone, anywhere, for any purpose or justification whatsoever. Undersheriff Stuchlik says that "the threats come with the job," but the protesters at Volk Field disagree and do not accept that anyone should be targeted or threatened for extermination because of the color of their skin, the country they live in, their religion or the uniform they wear.
Undersheriff Stuchlik's terrifying contention that "Officers are being targeted at an alarming rate" is contradicted by statistics from the National Police Officers Memorial Fund that indicate that killings of police officers have declined over the past twenty years. As for the "hate groups" that are executing police officers, it might be noted, too, that Micah Xavier Johnson who recently murdered five Dallas police officers was an Army Reservist and a veteran of the senseless violence in Afghanistan and Gavin Eugene Long, who killed three officers in Baton Rouge, was a former Marine who had participated in the destruction of Iraq. It is the protestors that Undersheriff Stuchlik chooses to slander who are constructively addressing the roots of the violence against police officers that he decries.
The Juneau County Sheriff's Department's actions show a disturbing pattern reminiscent of the chilling effects of McCarthyism in the 1950s and the FBI's COINTELPRO activities in the 1960s. In some cases, these corrupt practices effectively silenced crucial voices of reason, and sometimes, they crushed whole movements. The appearance that the Juneau County Sheriff's Department is likewise deliberately conspiring to discourage citizens from exercising their constitutionally protected rights to assemble to redress grievances peacefully cannot be discounted.
Malfeasance by the police and the courts, as they protect the criminals and twist laws to jail and malign those who cannot abide the killing going on in their names, is not an aberration. It is not limited to the treatment of a handful of white, middle-aged people in one rural Wisconsin county by uninformed and frightened small-town cops and judges. Black Lives Matter has been vilified as a hate group by higher authorities than Undersheriff Stuchlik. Prosecutors, politicians, and police have overfilled the nation's jails with poor and Black people by manipulating charges.
In North Dakota, Sheriff Kyle Kirchmeier is engaging in a similar "psyops" (psychological operations) campaign as his Juneau County counterparts by making unsubstantiated accusations regarding the indigenous people gathered nonviolently at Standing Rock to oppose the Bakken pipeline. These include making public "reports of uh, weapons, of uh, pipebombs, of some shots fired, of vandalism happening in that area, and uh, assaults on private security." In both places false accusations are used to justify oppressive, disproportionate and even illegal police responses to peaceful protests. Planting suspicions, even if they were not blatant fabrications, that we have among us those who would so violate the spirit and purpose of our organizations as to threaten violence without identifying that person to us is an attack on our communities.
Such misconduct by police only escalates the likelihood of violence, just as the drone attacks by the United States military escalate the violence in the many nations where they are used. The ignorance and fear that seems to inform the actions of the Juneau County Sheriff's Department is not so different from that which impels our nation's foreign policy and what drives the prison industrial complex here at home.
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr, long ago noted that the violence in American streets is a direct and inevitable result of the violence of our county's wars. The racial profiling that results in the killings of unarmed Black citizens, even children, by police in American streets is the domestic expression of the "patterns of behavior" surveilled by Shadow Drones that trigger the "signature strike" executions of people of color in the wars abroad. The violence in our streets is the war coming home, and running the license plates of law-abiding citizens will not make Juneau County Sheriff's deputies any safer so long as those wars rage on.
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Visits and Conversations in a Kabul Winter
Jan 03, 2016
Here in Kabul, last week, at the Afghan Peace Volunteer (APV) community home that hosts me, I watched Abdulhai and visiting activist Aaron Hughes work out ways to secure the greenhouse which they had partially assembled that morning. Warmed by the effort and with the sun beaming down on all of us, they sat on the garden ledge in their shirtsleeves although it is a quite cold winter here, talking about the greenhouse perched on an uneven garden plot before them.
I had watched Aaron, Abdulhai, Ron and Hakim maneuver the partly assembled greenhouse from a neighbor's storage area, over a fence, and onto the garden plot. Aaron is 6 ft. 5 inches tall. His strength and height helped the process considerably.
Aaron and I first met in 2005, shortly after he returned from deployment to Iraq with the Illinois National Guard. The U.S. military had assigned him to drive trucks from Kuwaiti supply depots to Forward Operating Bases across Iraq. At the end of his deployment, convinced he couldn't endure another stint with the military, after seeing how futile, dehumanizing and destructive the U.S. occupation of Iraq had been, he took an option to come home, and decided, beyond committing to work organizing with Iraq Veterans Against the War, to become an artist, to create beauty. At age 33, he feels plenty of energy both for artwork and antiwar organizing efforts.
Aaron came to Afghanistan to present a particular project, related to prisoners in Guantanamo, called "Tea," and to join the Afghan Peace Volunteers in various efforts to teach and create art. His construction skills became a greatly needed bonus as the greenhouse took shape.
Every day has been filled with learning exchanges. Tea creates an occasion for community, for having conversations together. Aaron taught children at the Borderfree Center to make potato prints using halved potatoes and acrylic paint. Several teachers at the school have learned sketching and print making skills from him. And Aaron says he's been learning, too.
Ali describes the plight of five "day laborers" the APVs have gotten to know. Their names are Mohammed Dawoud, Ali Reza, Jalaladeen, Mirajadeen, and Qurban. The men wait all day, at Pul-e-Surkh intersection, where a bridge spans a putrid, dried up riverbed, hoping for a single day's work even if at days' end they take home just two or three dollars. Many shiver outdoors for hours, unemployed and desperate.
Especially during winter months, when construction shuts down, work is scarce. If chosen to work for part or all of a day, a laborer has no choice but to settle for extremely low wages. Hundreds of other laborers would take the rate being offered, so there is no point in bargaining for more. Day laborers live in miserable homes, always at a loss for resources to feed their families. When hired for temporary work, it will likely involve hauling heavy materials all day, back straining labor which some project managers might not impose on animals, since the animals would be more expensive to replace.
The five have talked about their needs with APV members. Each dreams of acquiring a cart from which he could sell goods. Qurban would like to set up a tea serving cart and serve tea to laborers waiting for possible work. The equipment would give them a small measure of independence. The APVs try to learn about micro-loans and possibilities for offering limited assistance.
Most afternoons during Aaron's visit, a team of Afghan Peace Volunteers would return from visits to families living on nearby mountainsides, surveying for families most in need of help from "The Duvet Project," the APV's program hiring local seamstresses to make 3,000 heavy blankets for distribution, free of charge, to impoverished families, or assistance through the "Borderfree Center Street Kids' School", supplemental schooling for child street vendors with community support for their families making it possible for the children to attend schools in Kabul. The school's name is inspired by a call for a border-free world issued by U.S. professor Noam Chomsky - throughout the world, working to build community with impoverished people seems necessary to keeping ourselves honest and dedicated in a struggle against war. Decades of war have brought the people of Kabul to the place where they are now. The APVs call for an Afghanistan undivided by ethnic hostilities and external intrusions, with hard work on their neighbors' behalf. And they also simply want to help.
The young people exude health and vigor, warming themselves at a wood-burning stove after the long hikes up the slopes. Ali flopped down on a mat, one day, leaning back with legs crossed, and described a man he had met whose wife could not bear him a child, and so the man adopted a child left by parents at a mosque. The child, at age three, could not walk, and there was no hope of obtaining whatever treatment might have been available in a rich country or one not at war. At age 18, living as a shut-in with his parents, the child can communicate with no-one but his adoptive father. Meanwhile no-one in the family can find work.
In another home, a woman doesn't have work and her husband cannot walk. She was away from home when Ali stopped by - when asked, the children said she has work in the nearby mosque, but Ali believes the woman may be obtaining money by begging. Living on a mountainside, in primitive homes a long way from drinking water, lacking income and caring for loved ones unable to walk seems unbearably challenging.
As APVs learn the stories of families they visit, relationships grow. "I was out running early one morning," said Abdulhai, "and I heard a woman begging. I couldn't see her under her burqa, but I recognized her voice and stopped." "Aren't you Habib's grandmother?" he had politely asked. The Afghan Peace Volunteers have been encouraging Habib to not only be part of the Borderfree Center Street Kids School, but also to join five older street kids who will begin learning how to organize the duvet production and distribution.
The young volunteers find their lives touched and shaped by ongoing challenges in these stories, especially since some of the stories are similar to their own experiences growing up during Afghanistan's civil war and often being without food and blankets in their own homes.
Hoor, for instance, faces challenges from teachers, friends and relatives, who question the generous choices he makes. Hoor has been earning small sums of money as a researcher for a project sponsored by an American university. When he is paid, he first goes to a sprawling refugee camp where he has gotten to know one of the neediest families. He gives a portion of his earnings to this family, even though his own family depends very much on his income.
On Aaron's final day with us here in Kabul, he and the APVs were putting finishing touches on the greenhouse and getting ready to plant cucumber seeds. The Dari term for a greenhouse literally translates as "flower house." Aaron will entrust to the APVs twenty plaster cast cups, decorated with flowers, each bearing the name of an Afghan citizen who lived in Guantanamo Prison. Each vessel is a testament to the withering effects of war and the crushing realities faced by detainees living under tortuous conditions. You could say the economy here is another such imprisoning consequence of war, of great-power ambitions, played out over many decades, in bloodshed and greed.
The path out of war seems to involve creating peace where we can, in earnest community with people whose basic needs aren't met. As the APVs put it, it involves creating a green and equal world, acting conscientiously to abolish war.
Aaron helps build a "flower house" to shelter new seeds. He forges links with people who might otherwise be forgotten, and urges us to sit down with each other and talk. These are small seeds, and we shelter and nurture them in our hope to find future generations ready to abandon the violence of economic and environmental exploitation, --young people convinced that war is futile, whose empathy for neighbors in need steadies and energizes them.
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Flowers from Guantanamo
Dec 21, 2015
Here in Kabul, young friends with the Afghan Peace Volunteers look forward to learning more about "The Tea Project" in late December, when Aaron Hughes arrives, an artist, a U.S. military veteran, and a core member of Iraq Veterans Against War. He'll carry with him 20 plaster replicas of a standard-issue, factory-made Styrofoam cup. They're part of a set numbering 779 replica cups, each cup dedicated to prisoners detained in Guantanamo. In the entire collection, 220 of the cups bear the names of Afghan citizens imprisoned in Guantanamo.
In Guantanamo, with each evening meal, Guantanamo prisoners are served tea in styrofoam cups. Many prisoners etch floral designs into their cups, which become a nightly artistic outlet for men with few other freedoms allowed them. Aaron had heard a former Guantanamo guard describe how deeply he grew to deeply love the cups that had become works of art.
The cups would then be collected, each night, and turned over to military intelligence which most likely just dumped them. Aaron's cups are more durable. A Guantanamo prisoner's name is written on the base of every cup, and each carries a unique design. Following the practice of the prisoners, Aaron focused on etching floral patterns into the cups he created, displaying flowers that are native to each prisoner's homeland. 220 of the cups he has sculpted bear the names of prisoners from Afghanistan.
Life stories represented by each cup are reaching a wide variety of individuals and groups during Aaron's travels on behalf of the project. He invites people to sit with him, sip tea from the cups, and talk about their stories related to war, destruction, peace, love, creativity ...the conversations range freely, but the cups bring a certain focus, remembering the prisoners in Guantanamo.
I wish Aaron could somehow sit across from Tariq Ba Odah and serve him tea. Now 36 years old, Tariq Ba Odah, a Yemeni citizen, arrived in Guantanamo in 2002, when he was only 23. Detained without charge in Guantanamo since 2002, Tariq has maintained a hunger strike since 2007. He now weighs 74 pounds. His lawyers say that he visibly suffers from severe effects of malnutrition and is at serious risk of permanent physical and neurological impairment and death. Tariq Ba Odah endures horrible force-feeding rather than cooperating with the system that has separated him and the other prisoners from loved ones, subjecting them to torture and dehumanizing conditions.
Witness Against Torture activists from the U.S. focused on Tariq Ba Odah's life in Guantanamo when they set up their encampment, in late November, 2015, in Cuba, outside the U.S. naval base. Like Aaron, they feel great empathy for the people imprisoned in Guantanamo, along with the responsibility to keep educating U.S. people about the plight of 107 prisoners still held there. The delegation demanded that the prison close. They reject a new plan being developed by the Obama administration, which would move the Guantanamo prisoners to prisons in the U.S., some still to be held indefinitely without charge or trial.
"Simply moving Guantanamo is no solution," says Helen Schietinger of Washington, D.C. "That would mean holding on to the barbaric practice of indefinite detention. Besides, the entire domestic system of "correctional' institutions is a travesty, poisoned by racism. We need to overhaul the U.S. justice system, not add Guantanamo to it."
Enmanuel Candelario, an artist from New York, spoke bluntly about the base itself, calling it "an unwelcome symbol of U.S. power, which houses a torture chamber."
We can't directly nourish Tariq Ba Odah or bring him the consolation and affection for which he must also be starving. But together we can invite people to slow down and think about their actual circumstances and relationships with supposed enemies. We can help dismantle the terrible Islamophobia and fear that keeps many people in the U.S. imprisoned in the reckless grip of warmakers.
When Aaron arrives in the Afghan Peace Volunteer community, he will sit with the young volunteers and the child laborers who are part of the Borderfree Street Kids School. He'll also connect with local artists. While here, he hopes to serve tea and converse with people in a variety of places.
The conversations will very likely stir up questions about the 220 Afghans who were imprisoned in Guantanamo, as well as Afghans detained in the 'Afghan Guantanamo', Bagram Prison. I asked friends in our community here what questions they hope might be raised. Here are two responses: "Prisoners of the U.S. military - are they people who can create and enjoy art?" "Do they love?"
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No Warlords Need Apply--A Call for Credible Peacemaking in Afghanistan
A second round of peace talks between Afghan government officials and Taliban representatives, expected to begin before the end of July, 2015, suggests that some parties to the fighting want to declare a cease fire. But even in the short time since the first round on July 7th, fighting has intensified. The Taliban, the Afghan government forces, various militias and the U.S. have ramped up attacks, across Afghanistan.
Jul 30, 2015
A second round of peace talks between Afghan government officials and Taliban representatives, expected to begin before the end of July, 2015, suggests that some parties to the fighting want to declare a cease fire. But even in the short time since the first round on July 7th, fighting has intensified. The Taliban, the Afghan government forces, various militias and the U.S. have ramped up attacks, across Afghanistan.
Some analysts say the Taliban may be trying to gain territory and clout to give them leverage in 'peace talks.' Taliban forces, apparently beginning to splinter since the supposed death of Mullah Omar, are now competing with a new Islamic State presence in Afghanistan as various armed groups try to recruit new fighters from among ultra-conservative sectors of the regional population. Spectacular and frightening suicide bombings, hostage taking and a demonstrated capacity to force Afghan government soldiers into retreat or surrender might bolster a group's claim to be effectively ejecting foreigners from Afghanistan.
However, the U.S., with its history of waging aerial attacks, using helicopters and weaponized drones, and engaging in constant aerial surveillance, along with its continued night raids and detention of civilians, effectively carries itself as the most formidable warlord in the region.
Throughout June, according to the New York Times, "American drones and warplanes fired against militants in Afghanistan more than twice as much as they had in any previous month this year, according to military statistics." On July 19th, 2015, U.S. helicopters even fired on an Afghan army facility in the Logar province, killing seven troops and wounding five others. The Afghan Ministry of Defense told CBS News that "coalition helicopters were flying through the area early Monday morning when they came under fire from insurgents. After the insurgents' attack on the helicopters, the helicopters bombed the area, and as a result an Afghan army outpost was destroyed."
Meanwhile, top U.S. military officials have met with president Ashraf Ghani to talk about extending the U.S. military presence in Afghanistan, beyond 2016, in light of a possible threat from Islamic State fighters. On July 19th, the Los Angeles Times reported that Gen. John Campbell, the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, and Gen. Martin Dempsey, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, met with Afghan President Ashraf Ghani. Following the meeting, General Dempsey said he agreed that the U.S. needed to have a transnational strategy against the Islamic State. He said he would raise Ghani's idea that Afghanistan "could serve as a hub from which the U.S., its allies and Afghanistan itself could work to prevent Islamic State from gaining followers in South Asia the way it has in the Middle East."
U.S. military officials diminish the credibility of any proposed cease fire when they suggest that the U.S. will, after all, consider maintaining bases and troops in Afghanistan far beyond the supposed 2016 evacuation of U.S. bases. Confidence in a cease fire is further undermined when parties to negotiations know that the U.S. could assassinate them if they appear on a list of U.S. targets.
The U.S. State Department published its Country Reports on Terrorism: 2014 on the 19th of June 2015, from which we can see that in 2002, at the start of the U.S.-led global war against terrorism, 725 people were killed worldwide. During President Barack Obama's first full year in office, in 2010, the number rose to 13,186. In other words, terrorist-related deaths grew by more than 4,000 percent from 2002 to 2010.
This is borne out on the ground in Afghanistan where the United Nations has been reporting record increases in civilian casualties.
Stopping the failed, counter-productive war against terrorism in Afghanistan and removing drones from her skies during peace talks would inspire respect for the idea of peace processes. Rural populations--the "constituency" of the Taliban in Afghanistan--fear the drones and look for protection, making them vulnerable to recruitment by armed militias vowing to eject the foreign militaries.
The U.S. could indicate that it doesn't wish to keep military personnel in Afghanistan or maintain ongoing bases there.
Yet, even were the U.S. to take these steps, a declared ceasefire between warlords who have, in the past, neglected the needs of Afghanistan's poorest communities, whose war making has exacerbated suffering and poverty, may not be very meaningful to ordinary people living in rural areas. Whose interests would the warlords aim to secure?
It seems that the most crucially needed ceasefire agreement in Afghanistan would be one that occurred among ordinary communities, agreeing to no longer cooperate with warring parties, to no longer allow warlords to use them as pawns. This kind of ceasefire might fill the need and longing for peace so often expressed by people who are weary of living through wave after wave of destruction. But ordinary Afghans living in rural areas need to feed their children, plant crops, restore irrigation systems, replenish their flocks and rehabilitate their agricultural infrastructure in order to survive. If they could have some realistic assurance of sustained resolve to help them reach these goals, they'd have good reason to link up and rise up in opposition to continued war.
What source of funding and skill could possibly offer the assistance required for this kind of rebuilding?
The U.S. military doesn't hesitate to demand sums for continued U.S. military presence in Afghanistan which could instead be dedicated to rebuilding the country. The U.S. should state that it wishes to pay reparations for suffering caused in the past. This could be done in the form of setting up an escrow account to be administered by an NGO or agency that has not been accused of succumbing to corruption in Afghanistan.
By doing so, the U.S. could credibly begin to withdraw from warlord status in Afghanistan, and apply itself to being part of reconstruction, setting a model desperately needed throughout the world.
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Fear and Learning in Kabul
"Now let us begin. Now let us rededicate ourselves to the long and bitter, but beautiful, struggle for a new world... Shall we say the odds are too great? ... the struggle is too hard? ... and we send our deepest regrets? Or will there be another message -- of longing, of hope, of solidarity... The choice is ours, and though we might prefer it otherwise, we must choose in this crucial moment of human history."
--Dr. Martin Luther King, Beyond Vietnam
Jun 09, 2015
"Now let us begin. Now let us rededicate ourselves to the long and bitter, but beautiful, struggle for a new world... Shall we say the odds are too great? ... the struggle is too hard? ... and we send our deepest regrets? Or will there be another message -- of longing, of hope, of solidarity... The choice is ours, and though we might prefer it otherwise, we must choose in this crucial moment of human history."
--Dr. Martin Luther King, Beyond Vietnam
Kabul--I've spent a wonderfully calm morning here in Kabul, listening to bird songs and to the call and response between mothers and their children in neighboring homes as families awaken and prepare their children for school. Maya Evans and I arrived here yesterday, and are just settling into the community quarters of our young hosts, The Afghan Peace Volunteers (APVs). Last night, they told us about the jarring and frightening events that marked the past few months of their lives in Kabul.
They described how they felt when bomb explosions, nearby, awakened them on several mornings. Some said they'd felt almost shell-shocked themselves discovering one recent day that thieves had ransacked their home. They shared their intense feelings of alarm at a notorious warlord's statement condemning a human rights demonstration in which several community members had participated. And their horror when a few weeks later, in Kabul, a young woman, an Islamic scholar named Farkhunda, was falsely accused in a street argument of desecrating the Koran, after which, to the roared approval of a frenzied mob of perhaps two thousand men, members of the crowd, with apparent police collusion, beat her to death. Our young friends quietly sort through their emotions in the face of inescapable and often overwhelming violence.
I thought about how to incorporate their stories into a course I've been preparing for an international online school that intends to help raise consciousness among people, across borders and share the results. I hope the school will help develop movements dedicated to simple living, radical sharing, service and, for many, nonviolent direct action on behalf of ending wars and injustices.
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Essentially, when Voices members go to Kabul, our "work" is to listen to and learn from our hosts and take back their stories of war to the relatively peaceful lands whose actions had brought that war down upon them. Before we'd even departed, the news from Afghanistan was already quite grim. Several dozen people dead in fighting between armed groups. A Kabul hotel attack on international businessmen the week before. We earnestly wrote our friends with a last minute offer to stay away, in hopes that we wouldn't make them targets of the violence. "Please come," our friends wrote us. So we're here.
The western presence in Afghanistan has already caused incalculable destruction, suffering and loss. A recently released Physicians for Social Responsibility calculated that since 2001 in Iraq and Afghanistan, U.S. wars have killed at least 1.3 million and quite possibly more than 2 million civilians.
The report chides U.S. political elites for attributing on-going violence in Afghanistan and Iraq to various types of internecine conflicts "as if the resurgence and brutality of such conflicts is unrelated to the destabilization caused by decades of military intervention."
Our young friends have survived the ravages of war, and each of them struggles with trauma, as their parents and grandparents have before them. When we have gone with them to visit refugee camps outside of Kabul, several have told of their own experiences as children, running away when their villages were attacked or occupied. We learn from them about the sorrows their mothers endured when there wasn't enough food to feed the family or fuel to carry them through heartless winters: when they themselves nearly died from hypothermia. Several of our young friends experience terrifying flashbacks when they hear accounts in the news of Afghans killed by missiles or gunfire within the horrified sight of their own family members and loved ones. They tremble and sometimes cry, recalling similar experiences from their own lives.
The story of Afghanistan in Western accounts is that Afghanistan cannot deal with its traumas, however much we try, with our bullets, bases and token schools and clinics, to help. Yet these young people steadfastly respond to their own traumas not by seeking revenge but by finding ways to help people in Kabul whose circumstances are worse than theirs, particularly 750,000 Afghans living, with their children, in squalid refugee camps.
The APVs are running an alternative school for street kids in Kabul. Little children who are the main breadwinners for their families find no time to learn basic math or "the alphabet" when spending more than eight hours daily working in the streets of Kabul. Some are vendors, some polish shoes, and some carry scales along roadways so that people can weigh themselves. In an economy collapsing under the weight of war and corruption, their hard earned income barely buys enough food for their families.
Children of the poorest families in Kabul will have better chances in life if they become literate. Never mind rising school enrollment figures often cited by the U.S. military as the benefits of occupation. The March 2015 CIA World Fact Book reports that 17.6 % of females over age 14 are literate; overall, in the teen and adult population only 31.7% can read or write.
After getting to know about 20 families whose children work in the streets, the APVs devised a plan through which each family receives a monthly sack of rice and large container of oil to offset the family's financial loss for sending their children to informal classes at the APV center and preparing to enroll them in school. Through continued outreach among Afghanistan's troubled ethnicities, APV members now include 80 children in the school and hope to serve 100 children soon.
Every Friday, the children pour into the center's courtyard and immediately line up to wash their feet and hands and brush their teeth at a communal faucet. Then they scramble up the stairs to their brightly decorated classroom and readily settle down when their teachers start the lessons. Three extraordinary young teachers, Zarghuna, Hadisa, and Farzana, feel encouraged now because many of the thirty-one street kids who were in the school last year learned to read and write fluently within nine months. Their experimentation with different teaching methods, including individualized learning, is paying off--unlike government school systems where many seventh graders are unable to read.
While leading a demonstration of street children, Zekerullah, who was once a street kid himself, was asked if he felt any fears. Zekerullah said that he feared that the children would be harmed if a bomb exploded. But his greater fear was that impoverishment would afflict them throughout their lives.
That message of courage and compassion will not--and cannot--always prevail. But if we take note of it, and even more, if, learning from its example, we take action to exemplify it ourselves, then it offers us a path out of childish fear, out of panicked collusion in war, and out, perhaps, of war's mad grip. We ourselves arrive in a notably better world when we determine to build it for others. Our own education, our own victory over fear, and our own arrival as equals in an adult world, can begin or begin again--now.
So let us begin.
This article was first published on Telesur English
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The Possibility of Escape (A Note from Lexington Federal Prison)
Editor's note: The author is currently serving a three-month sentence in Lexington Federal Prison in Kentucky for participation in an anti-drone protest.
Mar 10, 2015
Editor's note: The author is currently serving a three-month sentence in Lexington Federal Prison in Kentucky for participation in an anti-drone protest.
It was a little over two weeks ago that Marlo entered Atwood Hall, here in Lexington federal prison. Nearly all the women here are nonviolent offenders. When I first saw Marlo, her eyes seemed glued to the tiled floors as she shuffled along hallways. I guessed her age to be 25 or so. A few days later, she came to a choir rehearsal. She was still shy, but she looked up and offered a quiet smile when she joined the soprano section. The next time our choir gathered, Marlo raised her hand before we ended our rehearsal. "I got something to say," she said, as she stood. "When I first came here, I can tell all of you now, I was terrified. Just plain terrified. I have 70 months, and I felt so scared." The intake process for this, her introduction to the prison system, had badly frightened her, but before sundown that same day, a second intake process had occurred, with several inmates finding her, reassuring her, and getting her beyond that first panic.
During my four stints in U.S. federal prisons, I've witnessed long-term inmates' unconquerably humane response when a newcomer arrives. An unscripted choreography occurs and the new prisoner finds that other women will help her through the trauma of adjustment to being locked up for many months or years. Halfway through a three-month sentence myself, I'm saddened to realize that I'll very likely adapt to an outside world for which these women, and prisoners throughout the U.S. prison system, are often completely invisible.
U.S. state and federal prison populations have risen, since 1988, from 600,000 to an estimated 1,600,000 in 2012. This trend shows inhumane behavior on the part of lawmakers and myriads of employees who benefit from the so-called "criminal justice" system. But our entire society bears responsibility for what now can aptly be labeled a "prison-industrial complex." Constructing prisons and filling prisons with people who posed little or no threat to our security didn't happen secretively, without our consent. We watched, mesmerized perhaps, and allowed ourselves to become a country with the world's largest prison system.
A friend from home recently sent me encouraging news of Illinois Governor Rauner's initiative to address the problems in some of the United States' most brutally overcrowded prisons. A Chicago Tribune article from several weeks ago notes that Rauner plans to reduce the state's prison population by 25% over the next ten years, establishing the reduction as a goal through executive order. The article, by columnist Eric Zorn, cites a widely-cited recent report by the Vera Institute of Justice that "nearly 75% of the population of both sentenced offenders and pretrial detainees are in jail for nonviolent offenses like traffic, property, drugs or public order violations."
Skyrocketing costs of incarceration have finally convinced some lawmakers to work toward "reducing prison populations." Yesterday, I read a long report about how the California Department of Corrections has responded to a court-ordered demand that the state reduce the numbers of people locked up in California state prisons. The order was first issued in 2009 by a three-judge panel. The state appealed the order, but in 2011, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld it, ordering the state of California to comply by 2013. The California government sought and was granted two extensions. As of now, the order insists that California must reduce its prison population, by 2016, to "no more than 137.5 percent of the design capacity" of its state prisons.
Whatever plans Gov. Rauner's committee proposes for Illinois, the notoriously incarceration-minded Illinois state legislature is likely to put up just as vigorous a fight. Meanwhile the California report discusses "cost-effective measures," "recidivism reduction results," "rehabilitative programming" and "programming slots" at "in-state contract facilities." The language, highly impersonal, suggests warehousing. I wonder if zookeepers might be more attentive to the individuality of the beings they cage.
Trapped in a cruel and uncaring system, women here in Atwood Hall reliably find humane ways to cope. Among many signs of daily generosity, one of my favorites is the practice of "window shopping." Women place extra items they can spare in the window sills nearest the stairwells. A new prisoner can find new fresh socks, a warm knit cap, books, magazines, pitchers - items that quickly disappear and are soon replenished.
Perhaps we'll begin to see a trend toward finding humane ways to cope with seemingly intractable problems in today's criminal justice system. The U.S. Supreme Court's insistence that the State of California must release many thousands of prisoners signals a trend in which, as Gov. Rauner's order recognizes, "States across the country have enacted bi-partisan, data driven and evidence based reforms that have reduced the use of incarceration and its costs while protecting and improving public safety." Zorn notes that the Mac Arthur Foundation recently granted $75 million for a 5 year "Safety and Justice Challenge" meant "to reduce over-incarceration by changing the way America thinks about its prisons and jails."
I can't imagine a figure too high to pay, in dollars or in human work hours, to effectively challenge the way U.S. people think about safety and justice. In describing a class that he taught in a New Jersey maximum-security prison, Chris Hedges wrote:
The mass incarceration of primarily poor people of color, people who seldom have access to adequate legal defense and who are often kept behind bars for years for nonviolent crimes or for crimes they did not commit, is one of the most shameful mass injustices committed in the United States. The 28 men in my class have cumulatively spent 515 years in prison. Some of their sentences are utterly disproportionate to the crimes of which they are accused. Most are not even close to finishing their sentences or coming before a parole board, which rarely grants first-time applicants their liberty. Many of them are in for life. One of my students was arrested at the age of 14 for a crime that strong evidence suggests he did not commit. He will not be eligible for parole until he is 70. He never had a chance in court and because he cannot afford a private attorney he has no chance now of challenging the grotesque sentence handed to him as a child.
Here in Atwood Hall, guards and administrators know that they imprison humane, caring, generous and talented women, people not very different from their own relatives, friends and co-workers. Where are the "bad sisters" that could ever justify the punishment of isolating women like Marlo from their children and other loved ones for long and wearying years? I imagine that many BOP guards admire, as I do, the courage and fortitude of the women facing long sentences here. Do they wonder, sometimes, what courage would be required, in their own lives, to stop working as enforcers of the prison system? Or do they perhaps wish, sometimes, that the general public could muster up the will to stop voting for the prison system?
There is a cynical quote which a cynical friend of mine likes to quote to me, from the philosopher David Hume: "A prisoner who has neither money nor interest, discovers the impossibility of his escape, as well when he considers the obstinacy of the gaoler, as the walls and bars with which he is surrounded; and, in all attempts for his freedom, chooses rather to work upon the stone and iron of the one, than upon the inflexible nature of the other." It's the cliche of the prisoner attempting escape: the prisoner sees more hope tunneling out through bricks than appealing to the stone-faced jailer.
But who are the jailers? These prisons were built, and filled, in our name - in the name of making us "safer". More guards, more lawyers, judges, wardens, marshals, probation officers and court personnel would be hired even if the present ones resigned. Meanwhile the creative work to create real security, real community in the face of social dislocation and crime, would still need to be done. We, the broader public, must be the jailers. Sometimes we seem to be a stone rolling down the path of least resistance. But we're not stone. We can choose not to be jailers, and choose, instead, to be ever more inflexible in our resistance to injustice and to hatred born of fear.
I'm here among women, some of whom, I've been told, are supposed to be "hardened criminals." Fellow activists incarcerated in men's prisons likewise concur that the system is futile, merciless and wrongheaded. Our jailers, I'm convinced, can see this. Men like Governor Rauner, it seems, can see it, or his advisers can. Where are the inflexible ones keeping women like Marlo isolated from and lost to the world, trembling for their future for the next five years? I would like to make an appeal to you, and to myself two months from now when I've left here and once more rejoined the polite society of these women's "inflexible jailers." I choose to believe that we can be moved and these women can escape. I am writing this, as many have written and will write, to see if we're easier to move than iron and stone.
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