The Gut­less Paci­fist talks about the abuse of iraqi pris­on­ers and asks How high up does it go?
bq. There are many trou­bling polit­i­cal issues com­ing out of both the reports of abuse in iraq and ear­lier reports of abuse at Guan­tanamo Bay (which are look­ing increas­ingly accu­rate). But what is even more trou­bling to me is the larger moral issue that each of us who are Amer­i­cans may be in part respon­si­ble for these atroc­i­ties. For it is we who have allowed a cul­ture of death and vio­lence to develop.
Mean­while, a report on the abuses by “Maj. Gen. Anto­nio M. Taguba”:http://msnbc.msn.com/id/4894033/ is chill­ing in its detail­ing of phys­i­cal and psy­cholo­gial tor­ture report­edly tak­ing place at the U.S.-run Abu Ghraib Prison in Bagh­dad.
Joshua Micah Marshall’s “Talk­ing Points Memo”:http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/week_2004_05_02.php#002909 is keep­ing close tabs on devel­op­ments and reac­tions in Wash­ing­ton, includ­ing the President’s:
bq. The dis­as­ters now fac­ing the coun­try in iraq — some in slow motion, oth­ers by quick vio­lence — aren’t just hap­pen­ing on the president’s watch. They are hap­pen­ing in a real sense, really in the deep­est sense, because of him — because of his atten­tion to the sim­u­lacra of lead­er­ship rather than the real thing, which is more dif­fi­cult and demand­ing, both per­son­ally and morally.
Don’t miss Marshall’s thought­ful com­par­i­son of “Pres­i­dent Bush to a bad C.E.O.”:http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/week_2004_05_02.php#002906.
The other essen­tial read­ing on all this is Sey­mour Hersh’s “New Yorker arti­cle on the tor­ture at Abu Ghraib”:http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/.

Here’s a web­site of “Jeremy Hinz­man, a U.S. Army sol­dier who became a a con­sci­en­tious objector”:http://www.jeremyhinzman.net/faq.html in the course of his ser­vice. His appli­ca­tions denied, he moved to Canada and is seek­ing polit­i­cal asy­lum there.
I find I can under­stand the issues all too well. In only a slightly-parallel uni­verse, I’d be in iraq myself instead of pub­lish­ing Non​vi​o​lence​.org. My father, a vet­eran who fought in the South Pacific in World War II, really wanted me to join the U.S. Navy and attend the Naval Acad­emy at Annapo­lis. For quite some time, I seri­ously con­sid­ered it. I am attracted to the idea of ser­vice and duty and putting in hard work for some­thing I believe in.
Hinzman’s story is get­ting a lot of main­stream cov­er­age, I sus­pect because the “escape to Canada” angle has so many Vietnam-era echoes that res­onate with that gen­er­a­tion. I wish Hinz­man would flesh out his web­site story though. His Fre­quently Asked Ques­tions leaves out some impor­tant details that could really make the story–why did he join the Army in the first place, what were some of the expe­ri­ences that led him to rethink his duty, etc. I’d rec­om­mend Jeff Paterson’s “Gulf War Refusenik”:http://jeff.paterson.net/ site, which includes lots of sto­ries includ­ing his own:
bq. “What am I going to do with my life?” has always been huge ques­tion of youth, and today in the wake of the hor­ror and tragedy of New York Sep­tem­ber 11th this ques­tion has increased impor­tance for mil­lions of young peo­ple. No one who has seen the images will ever for­get… If I hadn’t spent those four years in the Marine Corps, I might be inclined to fall into line now. Most of the time my unit trained to fight a war against peas­ants who dared to strug­gle against “Amer­i­can inter­ests” in their homelands-specifically Nicaragua, El Sal­vador, and Guatemala… Faced with this real­ity, I began the process of becom­ing un-American-meaning that the inter­ests of the peo­ple of the world began to weigh heav­ier than my self-interest. I real­ized that the world did not need or want another U.S. troop…
There are bound to be more sto­ries all the time of service-people who find a dif­fer­ent real­ity when they land on for­eign shores. How many will rethink their rela­tion­ship to the U.S. mil­i­tary. How many will fol­low Paterson’s exam­ple of becom­ing “un-American”?

From the “Mordechai Vanunu”:/vanunu site:
bq.. “PEACE HERO” MORDECHAI VANUNU, LEAVING PRISON IN HOURS, WILL BE GREETED BY WHITE DOVES, FLOWERS… AND YET MORE PUNISHMENT
In less than twelve hours, Israel’s cap­tive Mordechai Vanunu is to walk out of Shikma Prison, where his home was a cell for the last 18 years. Over 100 inter­na­tional anti-nuclear, peace and human rights activists, and at least as many Israeli sup­port­ers of the nuclear whistle­blower will assem­ble out­side the prison gate at 8:00 am Wednes­day morn­ing
Then the leash stiff­ens, and the col­lar tight­ens. Although his full sen­tence has been served and all his secrets have been told, Mordechai Vanunu’s next pun­ish­ment is to shun all con­tact with for­eign­ers and most mod­ern com­mu­ni­ca­tions while con­fined to the city of Jaffa for one year. He is denied his pass­port and is for­bid­den to enter embassies or approach bor­ders and air­ports. He may not talk to Israelis about his work at the nuclear weapons fac­tory in Dimona, nor even recite his pub­lished rev­e­la­tions from the pages of the Lon­don Sun­day Times in Octo­ber, 1986.

The big news is more ter­ror, over 190 dead in Spain. Vio­lence is being used to wage pol­i­tics yet again. As I write, “con­flict­ing reports on the ter­ror­ists’ identities”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/3501364.stm are still com­ing through.
Spain Strug­gles to Absorb Worst Ter­ror­ist Attack in Its His­tory
bq. In the worst ter­ror­ist attack in Span­ish his­tory, at least 10 bombs exploded dur­ing rush hour today in three com­muter train sta­tions here. The Inte­rior Min­istry said 190 peo­ple were killed and more than 1,200 wounded.

The War Resisters League has issued its famous “Pie Chart” flyer show­ing “Where Your Income Tax Money Really Goes”:http://warresisters.org/piechart.htm. An annual tra­di­tion, this flyer breaks down U.S. gov­ern­ment spend­ing.
This year 49% of income-tax gen­er­ated fed­eral spend­ing is going to the mil­i­tary. That’s $536 bil­lion for cur­rent mil­i­tary spend­ing, $349 bil­lion to pay for past mil­i­tary spend­ing and a pro­jected $50 bil­lion that the Pres­i­dent will ask Con­gress for after the elec­tions.
There’s just so much wrong with this amount of mil­iary spend­ing. This is money that could be going into job cre­ation, into sup­port­ing afford­able health care for Amer­i­cans, into giv­ing our kids bet­ter edu­ca­tion. The strongest defense a coun­try could ever have is invest­ing in its peo­ple, but that’s impos­si­ble if we’re spend­ing half of our taxes on bombs. And hav­ing all these bombs around makes us itchy to use them and gives us the abil­ity to fight wars largely by our­selves.
The WRL flyer always goes beyond mere num­ber crunch­ing, how­ever, to show some of the human impact of this inbal­anced spend­ing. This time we have list­ings of “lives lost in Afghanistan & iraq,” lives lost due to poor health stan­dards around the world, the lost free­dom of pris­on­ers being held by the U.S. against the Geneva Accords, and the friends “lost and found” by the U.S.‘s uni­lat­er­al­ist war.

More on the “myth that is ‘Pri­vate Jessica’”:www.guardian.co.uk/iraq/Story/0,2763,1081207,00.html, a media cre­ation born of pro­pa­ganda and racism. I feel sad for the real Jes­sica Lynch caught up in all this. else­where Paul Krug­man point out how the Bush Admin­is­tra­tion isn’t “sup­port­ing the troops”:http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/11/opinion/11KRUG.html, “But I also sus­pect that a gov­ern­ment of, by and for the eco­nomic elite is hav­ing trou­ble over­com­ing its basic lack of empa­thy with the working-class men and women who make up our armed forces.”

Updat­ing a story we “brought you back in July”:http://www.nonviolence.org/articles/000008.php , the U.S. Jus­tice Depart­ment wants to “drop the charges against the only per­son charged in an Amer­i­can court over the Sep­tem­ber 11 attacks two years ago”:http://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/26/national/26TeRR.html. The Jus­tice Depart­ment doesn’t want to allow Zacarias Mous­saoui or his defense team to inter­view other sus­pected ter­ror­ists.
What does Mous­saoui know? What do his poten­tial defense wit­nesses know? And why doesn’t U.S. Attor­ney Gen­eral John Ashcroft want these peo­ple to speak in an open trial? Mous­saoui has admit­ted being a mem­ber of Al Qaeda but any infor­ma­tion he or his wit­nesses know is at least two years old. Why is a trial so wor­ri­some that the U.S. would throw away a trial over it?

From the War Resisters League’s Judith Mahoney Paster­nak, “an hon­est look at the chal­lenge paci­fism faces in places like the Congo”:www.warresisters.org/nva0703-1.htm:
bq. There are those who chal­lenge the paci­fist posi­tion with such ques­tions as, “A man with a gun is aim­ing it at your mother. You have a gun in your hand. What non­vi­o­lent action do you take?” Our usual answer is, “I’m a paci­fist. I don’t have a gun in my hand. Next ques­tion.” But at least once in every generation—more fre­quently, alas, in these violence-ridden years—the chal­lenge is a harder one to shrug off with a flip answer.
The answer of course is to stop wars before they start, by stop­ping the arms trade, the dic­ta­tor­ships, and the crush­ing eco­nomic reforms demanded by West­ern banks _before_ these forces all com­bine and erupt into war. Paster­nak out­lines four parts to a blue­print that could end much of the vio­lence in the Congo.
I’ve always been impressed that the folks at War Resisters are will­ing to talk about the lim­its of non­vi­o­lence (see David McReynolds seven-part “Phi­los­o­phy of Nonviolence”:www.nonviolence.org/issues/philosophy-nonviolence.php). While war is never the only option (and arguably never the best one), it’s much more effec­tive to stop wars ten years before the bul­lets start fly­ing. In each of the wars the U.S. has fought recently, we can see past U.S. poli­cies set­ting up the con­flict ten, twenty and thirty years ago.
The largest peace marches in the world can rarely pre­vent a war once the troops ships have set sail. If U.S. pol­icy and aid hadn’t sup­ported the “wrong” side in Iraq and Afghanistan twenty years ago, I don’t think we would have fought these cur­rent wars. Paci­fists and their kin need to start ask­ing the tough ques­tions about the cur­rent repres­sive regimes the U.S. is supporting–places like Saudi Ara­bia and Pakistan–and we need to demand that build­ing democ­racy is our country’s num­ber one goal in the Iraq and Afghanistan occu­pa­tions (yes, pri­or­i­tize it _over_ secu­rity, so that we “don’t replace Sad­dam Hus­sein with equally repres­sive thugs”:www.nonviolence.org/articles/000130.php.