A Friendly Letter, The Blog.

In Spring a (not so) young man’s fancy lightly turns to thoughts of . . . cleaning up the legacy of torture taxi flights from North Carolina. On April 20, 2013, that meant heading out to Smithfield, where a CIA front company called Aero Contractors is barricaded at the Johnston county Airport behind high fences and heavy security. There I gathered with a dozen or so other steadfast activists, and we went to work. Here are some photos, with explanatory captions.

This is Allyson Caison, whose brilliant brainchild it was to have our NC Stop Torture Now group adopt the highway in front of Aero Contractors in Smithfield. Aero is a CIA front company that has long been involved in the “torture taxi” business, as disclosed by numerous investigations.

And here’s some of the crew that gathered to make good on our pledge, from left: Christina Cowger, Steve Newsom, Directo or Quaker House in Fayetteville NC, and Peggy Misch of Carrboro.

And here’s Aero’s company sign, in a photo snapped several years ago, which is now well-concealed by several high fences and this woods.

This map shows where Smithfield is in North Carolina.

Here are some of the crew that gathered for the cleanup, from left: Christina Cowger, Steve Newsom (Director of Quaker House in Fayetteville NC), and Peggy Misch of Carrboro NC.

And More of the crew: at center is Lynn Newsom, Co-Director of Quaker House

Getting Into The Weeds to Get The Trash. There was plenty.

This is just part of the haul — the crew filled something like 20 bags full.

Even Your Humble Scribe Got a Bag Full . . .

There’s more trash to clean up. And as yet, there’s been no accountability for the “War On Terror” torture program that was the ultimate goal of this cleanup effort. So as the sign indicates, we’ll be back.
For more on Aero Contractors and its torture flights, go here and here and here.

Chuck Fager

As “Zero Dark Thirty” winds down, after Osama Bin Laden is dead, a big military transport is shown, parked on some windswept desert runway. As CIA agent Maya (Jessica Chastain) climbs into its open maw, the pilot emerges to tell her she’s the only passenger listed for the flight.

“You must be pretty important,” he says. “Where do you wanna go?”

Maya slowly straps herself into a fold-down seat, alone as the plane’s huge cargo door closes out the world beyond its drab, cavernous fuselage. After a moment, a tear slowly trickles from each of her eyes, though she does not sob or lose her composure. “ZD30″ ends a moment later, with Maya staring shakily ahead, still not answering the pilot’s query.

Where does she want to go, indeed? For me, this ending silence was one of the “loudest,” most revealing moments in an often explosively noisy film.

Jessica Chastain

For despite Jessica Chastain’s fine acting, this mute moment framed and underscored her character’s essential emptiness. Maya has no history, no family, no friends or personal life, not even a last name, no emotional range, and evidently no professional ambition beyond the decade-long, monomaniac drive to wreak lethal revenge on the architect of September 11. In the end, while OBL may be dead, her life too, it appears, has been all-but consumed in the process. There is evidently a real CIA agent behind her character; and both embody a shameful, emptying time in our history.

Many Americans can no doubt still identify with Maya’s payback obsession. And under director Kathryn Bigelow’s sure hand, the film’s driving pace and vivid visuals make this process easier while the story unreels. Yet for me the film’s emotional frame came to feel increasingly dated, even obsolete. And I believe I’m not alone in that sense.

After all, it’s 2013, and while Osama Bin Laden is dead (and General Motors is alive), by now more and more of us are beginning to realize that even so, America has lost the two reflexive wars our panicked leaders unleashed on Iraq and Afghanistan after the Twin Towers attacks. And besides these major strategic defeats; beyond the trillions of dollars wasted, tens of thousands killed, and millions made refugees — in the process we also threw away many of our rights at home, and values essential to our moral standing in the world. Was this really the only way to deal with the horror of the September attacks?

The loss of credibility may still be easy for many of us to ignore, but consider: today, what tyrants will do other than smirk and snicker at U.S. State Department reports tut-tutting about their lousy human rights records? Not that our hands were ever entirely clean; but the years of Maya’s obsession were also when the U.S. sank to unprecedented lows. At home, those years similarly yielded steadily increasing domestic repression, from wiretapping to the coordinated crackdowns on Occupy Wall Street, and now the growing shadows of domestic drones circling above our homes and streets.

Yet credibility is not a strong enough term for this loss. Honor helps. But “soul” is better. Dr. Martin Luther King’s motto for his civil rights career was, “Saving the Soul of America.” The crusade by Maya, the CIA and their White House masters to find and kill OBL succeeded, but along the way America lost much, perhaps most, of its “soul.” And slowly, fitfully, Americans are beginning to realize that. Hence for instance, the now overwhelming public urge, across the political spectrum, to get our troops the hell out of Afghanistan, ASAP.

None of this change is addressed in ZD30. But on reflection, it’s not hard to see it coming, given the film’s matter-of-fact acceptance of U.S. torture as of no moral weight whatever, just part of the way it was. (After all, we now know that there were many internal dissenters against torture. But the film steadfastly reflects the CIA’s postwar ass-covering official version.)

Yet after watching the film, the raging debate over whether ZD30 justifies torture seems to me less important than whether it will serve as a new excuse for much of the public to simply keep ignoring the torture record and its ongoing implications.

And my gut tells me that it won’t work very well in that regard — that the hysterical panic that ZD30 and agent Maya so brilliantly exemplify and exploit are now beginning to loosen their hold on us. One very good sign of this shift is the fierceness and tenacity with which knowledgeable critics have debunked the script’s implicit claims of torture’s value.

In the end, the film reminded me of another much-trumpeted incident of the same bloody decade: the capture of Saddam Hussein in his Iraq rabbit hole. We put him on trial and had him executed. Given his many crimes, a conviction was easy, and Saddam’s trial had at least some color of law.

Yet Saddam’s execution did not save our Iraq occupation from inglorious defeat. Nor has killing OBL prevented the Afghan war from facing a similar fate. No matter how many Oscars “Zero Dark Thirty” might win, all the cinematic skill of Bigelow, Chastain and their CIA consultants will not change that tragically empty outcome.

Where then do we go to regain our liberties, our international credibility, our “soul”? Like Maya after the pilot spoke, our spymasters, our politicians, and some of our best filmmakers all face such questions mutely, as yet without any meaningful answers.
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A CIA front company, Aero Contractors, ran “torture taxi” flights out of the Johnston County airport in North Carolina for years. (This is not a rumor; the New York Times among others “outed” the operation years ago.)

Supposedly torture was banned by presidential order in 2009. Yet Aero Contractors has since expanded and tightened its security; so something secretive is till going on there.

A dogged band of local folks have been protesting these flights since about 2005. They call themselves NC Stop Torture Now. Over the years they’ve carried on many different kinds of actions, and have own awards for their inventiveness and persistence. Here’s one of their protests in front of Aero’s hangars:

Over the years, the Stop Torture Now protests have taken many forms, but most included appeals to authorities to investigate what was going on there, as being in violation of national and international law.
These pleas have so far been ignored. But the activists have not given up. When one tactic was brushed aside, they thought up another one.

Now, as 2013 arrives, these activists are taking yet another new tack: led by Allyson Caison, one of the group’s stalwarts, they have adopted the highway in front of Aero, and will be “cleaning up torture” right on its doorstep. Take a bow, Allyson:

The adaptability as well as persistence of NC Stop Torture Now has put it in the forefront of the long-term effort to get an accounting for the US torture program. And as one of the group’s mottos says: Accountability Today Will Stop Torture Tomorrow.

Chuck Fager

So. Former President Bush said “Damn right,” he’d approved the torture by waterboarding of Khaled Sheikh Muhammad, and other terror suspects. (Dick Cheney merely said he was “a big fan” of such tactics.)

That statement, and others like it, is in his new memoir, “Decision Points.” Should Americans be proud of his defiant avowal? More important, should this trumpeting of torture make us feel safer in our dangerous world?

The answer is No.

Bush was wrong. Damn wrong.

Why? The evidence is in: Bush’s torture program did not make Americans safer. Just the opposite.

There are many witnesses. Longtime FBI agent John Cloonan, for one, interrogated many terror suspects. In 2008 he told the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee that,

Based on my experience in talking to al Qaeda members, I am persuaded that revenge, in the form of a catastrophic attack on the homeland, is coming, that a new generation of jihadist martyrs, motivated in part by the images from Abu Ghraib, is, as we speak, planning to kill Americans and that nothing gleaned from the use of coercive interrogation techniques will be of any significant use in the forestalling this calamitous eventuality.

The short version: the Bush torture program increased — not decreased–the danger of attacks on the U.S. The program was wrong. Damn wrong.

In addition, Bush’s torture program endangered U.S. troops. Veteran combat interrogator Matthew Alexander knows this first-hand. He broke some major insurgent leaders in Iraq. Without torture. His book, How to Break a Terrorist, explains how.

What does he say about the Bush torture program?

“Torture and abuse cost American lives.”

Why?

I learned in Iraq that the No. 1 reason foreign fighters flocked there to fight were the abuses carried out at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo,” Alexander wrote in the Washington Post in 2008. “Our policy of torture was directly and swiftly recruiting fighters for al-Qaeda in Iraq

.
Matthew Alexander

The dangers were not just theoretical. The number of U.S. soldiers who have died because of our torture policy will never be definitively known, but it is fair to say that it is close to the number of lives lost on Sept. 11, 2001. How anyone can say that torture keeps Americans safe is beyond me — unless you don’t count American soldiers as Americans.

I do count them. So did the brass. Alberto Mora, former general counsel of the U.S. Navy, said: “I never met a senior military officer that didn’t object to these policies. They caused the senior military to hold the Bush administration in contempt.”

In other words, torture was wrong for our troops. Damn wrong.

The Bush torture program made Americans more unsafe. And it cost the lives of our troops.

But that’s not all. Bush’s admission also defied international laws against torture, and US federal law, which makes torture subject to a stiff prison term.

Bush thinks it makes no difference if a former U.S. President publicly mocks both national and international laws. He’s wrong again. Damn wrong.

When I worked at the State Department,” wrote Philip Zelikow, former deputy Secretary of State, “some of America’s best European allies found it increasingly difficult to assist us in counterterrorism because they feared becoming complicit in a program their governments abhorred. This was not a hypothetical concern.

Adds the Senate armed Services Committee in a 2010 report:

The fact that America is seen in a negative light by so many complicates our ability to attract allies to our side, strengthens the hand of our enemies, and reduces our ability to collect intelligence that can save lives.

So. Bush may keep bragging about his torture decisions. But America knows better, and must do better. The US torture program is a failure, a crime and a disgrace. America needs an accounting for it.

We need it for our safety, and for our honor.

Damn right.

In a post at the Quaker House blog I’ve reprinted an Op Ed piece of mine that was just published on our local paper about the recent Wiklieaks disclosure of several hundred thousand documents from the Iraq occupation, and the resulting uproar in media around the world (but not so much in the US, where we think we have other things to worry about than torture.)

What’s this post got to do with Mayonnaise??

Or for that matter, power drills??
Click and read to find out.

‎[Sigh] I would have been very satisfied had I gone to my grave without ever mentioning the words “Glenn” and “Beck” together on this blog, or any other page.

Besides disliking the individual and what he stands for, I have also hoped to avoid turning this space into one more locale where the media chatter of the day is regurgitated and remasticated yet one more time, reinforcing its largely false and falsifying view of life, the world, and what’s important in both.

But sometimes s*it happens anyway.

G—- B—

So it goes with the “tagging” by a Facebook friend of my name being taken more or less in vain on the G—- B— program recently. I assure everyone it was through no initiative of my own. But the fact is the fact.

As you will see if you follow this link, someone plays for him a bit from an interview with former NAACP President Julian Bond, in which Bond quotes me as quoting Dr. King as saying (in 1965) that he’d like to see “a modified form of socialism” come about in the US.

It’s true. Dr. King did say that to me. The comment is recorded in context in my memoir, “Eating Dr. King’s Dinner,” about my time in Selma, Alabama with the civil rights movement.

In that small book, I also point out that at the time, I notably failed to ask the question which, in retrospect, immediately comes to mind, namely, “Um, Dr. King, just what do you mean by a MODIFIED form of socialism???” After all, “a modified form of socialism” could be just about anything.

But at that moment, I just nodded sagely, as if I understood completely; after all, I was 22.

An Outside Agitator’s mug shot - Selma, Alabama, 1965.

I guess this shocking disclosure left Mr B— reeling aghast, and may have borne some bitter fruit today (August 28, 2010) on the mall in Washington. I hear B— is having some kind of revival meeting there, but have not paid (nor do I intend to pay) it any attention.

Freedom of speech includes B—’s right to gather and blather; also my right to ignore it.

At least I was quoted accurately.

Martin Bell is a former BBC reporter and a former Member of the British parliament.

At a recent forum on peace and security issues organized by Colchester Quakers, Martin Bell had this to say about his country’s part in the Afghanistan war:

– From the Friend of London May 21, 2010

Martin Bell

So I’m walking through the Wal-Mart parking lot the other day –

(Yeah, I shop there. Whadda ya think — I live in one of your university-hugging, professional middle class greeny suburbs? This is army town, no time for that fluff. We had two Supercenters when I got here; now there’s five. Whole Foods & Costco are about ninety minutes away. I get there when I can; otherwise, cut me some slack here.)

— and I see the back of this parked van. On the rear window is a revelation.

I’ve glimpsed it before, driving past, but here it is, holding still, within reach of my pocket camera.

While the camera clicks, and clicks again (I operate on the “Bad Photographer” principle: take lots of shots to get a decent one), I begin thinking about military strategy. (You’ll see why in a minute.)

When war planners talk combat strategy, they put a lot of effort into finding and defining a target’s “center of gravity.”

A target’s “center of gravity” is whatever is most important in making it able to defend itself. It often involves more than simply weaponry; it may be a motivator, such as a beloved symbolic leader, for whom devoted followers are ready to fight to the last.

Similarly, in its home society, a military establishment’s “center of gravity” may not depend chiefly on guns or bombs. Rather, it can be the force which lends it the most legitimacy, which makes war and militarism worthy, honorable, deserving of support, even sacred. This is more likely to be a belief system than a stockpile of bombs or missiles; the belief system is what drives the stockpiling of bang-bang.

Diagram from a scholarly strategic study of the “center of gravity.” More on this here.

After working up-close and personal for several years with the US military, I think I can point to its center of gravity, or pretty close to it. I’m convinced that the “Spirit of War” that grips our society like the Beast 666 depends for its hold more than anything else on the devotion and blessing of US War Christianity.

American churches, many actively and others passively, have become tools of militarism’s influence over large segments of the citizenry.

There isn’t space here to describe this complex force in detail. It has infected Catholic as well as Protestant churches, and has a foothold in the Jewish community as well.

But here was a snapshot of it, starkly visible on the back of a van at Wal-Mart.

What are alleged peaceniks such as Quakers going to do about this “center of gravity” for the war machine? Answering that query will involve careful study, as much as for any other key element of the “Military Industrial Complex.”

But first it will require a waking up to the reality of the phenomenon. Very few American “Christian” scholars and activists have made that connection, alas.

One honorable (but lonely) exception is Charles Marsh, in his book, Wayward Christian Soldiers.

(All you ‘”Christo-centric” and Evangelical Quakers who have read it, raise your hands . . . .)

The role and impact of US War Christianity is easy to demonstrate, and anything but metaphorical or symbolic. It ranges from rampant crusader infiltration of the military academies, to signs plastered on Humvees in Iraq declaring “Jesus Killed Mohamed.” To emblems like this on the back window of a van in a Wal-Mart parking lot.

It is also not new – indeed, it glorified the extermination of Native Americans, upheld slavery, blessed America’s entry into the “great game” of imperialism. These days, among other things, it justifies torture and scoffs at climate change. It helps fill our days with distractions (e.g., arguments about dress codes and same sex marriage) in the face of official horror.

In my view, real progress toward making the U.S. a law-abiding nation, will sooner or later involve major thrusts against US War Christianity, as a key “center of gravity” of U.S. militarism.

Tackling the war spirit in the churches will not be easy; the struggle will be unsparing spiritual warfare that truly deserves the name. Moreover, as a people, Friends in the US are generally not well-prepared for the struggle. On the pastoral/evangelical side, accommodation to “patriotism” is largely unquestioned; flags in “sanctuaries” are not uncommon.

On the other side, all too many liberal Friends have spent much time avoiding and escaping everything to do with these and most other varieties of Christianity, becoming secular (aka “spiritual”) in all but name. When it comes to challenging this homegrown behemoth, they’re not even in the arena, never mind in the contest, preferring to talk of politics, or “inner peace” as the priority.

Well, when push comes to shove, avoidance will not not suffice. The sooner we begin getting ready, the better.

Bible verses for the day:

Exodus 15:3: The LORD is a warrior; the LORD is his name.

And

A welcome Home banner for a Marine returning from combat in Irag.

There are two groups of Friends for whom this task of getting ready seems particularly urgent:

One is those who are headed for the YAF gathering in Wichita later this month.

The other group is those who are not.

Chicago and Ohio. May 4 2010 is the 40th anniversary of the Kent State killings of four students by National Guard troops during an anti-Vietnam war protest.

This was a very major event for me. I could say a lot about this day and its aftermath, but this tee shirt does it better:

And the music of the day brings it all back. Read this part of a poem for Allison Krause, one of the victims, and listen to Crosby Stills Nash & Young’s “Four Dead In Ohio:

From a poem (the full text is here )about Allison Krause, one of the victims:

Flowers & Bullets, by Yevgeny Yevtushenko
(English translation by Anthony Kahn)
Of course:
Bullets don’t like people
who love flowers,
They’re jealous ladies, bullets,
short on kindness.
Allison Krause, nineteen years old,
you’re dead
for loving flowers.

When, thin and open as the pulse
of conscience,
you put a flower in a rifle’s mouth
and said,
“Flowers are better than bullets,”
that
was pure hope speaking.

Give no flowers to a state
that outlaws truth;
such states reciprocate
with cynical, cruel gifts,
and your gift, Allison Krause,
was the bullet
that blasted the flower.

“

But don’t stop there. There’s much more on Kent State at this Wikipedia page. Look it over as you listen to the Buffalo Springfield and “For What It’s Worth”:

And for those who are shocked that’s it’s been 40 years (you know who you are), there’s solace in recalling that The Man can’t stop our music. Let the Zimmers show you; then go on to the next post, May 4 Part Two:

”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haymarket_affair

May 4 1886: “The time will come when our silence will be more powerful than the voices you strangle today!”

The Haymarket massacre (or Haymarket riot) took place on Tuesday May 4, 1886, at the Haymarket Square in Chicago. It became the September 11 of its time. It began as a rally in support of striking workers. An unknown person threw a bomb at police as they tried to disperse the rally.

The bomb blast and ensuing gunfire from the police resulted in the deaths of seven police officers, mostly from friendly fire. An unknown but likely larger number of civilians were also killed.

In the internationally publicized legal proceedings that followed, eight anarchists were tried for murder. No concrete evidence linking any of them to the bombing was produced; yet amid a Buy cytoxan newspaper-driven media frenzy, all were convicted. Four were put to death, and one committed suicide in prison.

August Spies, one of anarchists who was executed, declared just before his hanging, on Nov. 11, 1887: “The time will come when our silence will be more powerful than the voices you strangle today!”

The “Haymarket Martyrs” became double-edged symbols: on the one side for policemen, of the risks entailed in upholding “law and order”; on the other for the growing labor movement. Monuments to both now stand in Chicago. And the annual May Day rallies for workers right (not much in evidence in the US, but widely-observed elsewhere) trace their origins to Haymarket and its impact.

The sentencing sparked outrage from budding labor and workers movements, resulted in protests around the world and made the defendants international political celebrities and heroes within labor and radical political circles. Meanwhile the press published often sensationalized accounts and opinions about the Haymarket affair which polarized public reaction.In an article titled “Anarchy’s Red Hand”, The New York Times, described the incident as the “bloody fruit” of “the villainous teachings of the Anarchists”. The Chicago Times described the defendants as “arch counselors of riot, pillage, incendiarism and murder”; to other newspapers they were “bloody brutes”, “red ruffians”, “dynamarchists”, “bloody monsters”, “cowards”, “cutthroats”, “thieves”, “assassins”, and “fiends.”

The 8-hour day — the concrete goal of the labor organizing which produced the Haymarket rally, and the wave of repression that it encountered. For too many workers, in the US and around the world, the 8 hour day is still a distant goal.