While Pentagon briefings are always exercises in evasion and propaganda, they rarely shock me anymore. But hearing Pentagon Press Secretary Geoff Morrell’s response to the news yesterday that twelve US soldiers now face charges of killing Afghan civilians for fun got to me.

I don’t believe the allegations here against these few individuals are representative of the behavior or the attitudes of the entire force. That said, it clearly—even if these allegations are proved to be untrue—is unhelpful. It does not help the—you know, the perceptions of our forces around the world. And so, the sad part about this is, even if these individuals are vindicated, even if they’re not true, the damage will have been done.

The “sad part” about murdering innocent civilians and collecting their fingers as trophies is how it will negatively affect “the perception of our forces around the world?” Really?

It’s not the fact that our troops are killing innocent people for sport and the pain and suffering that their families and friends inevitably now feel? It doesn’t get a lot more disgusting than that.

Earlier this week, environmental activist and writer Bill McKibben traveled with several students from Unity College in Maine to Washington DC to return one of the infamous Carter-era White House solar hot-water panels to its rightful owner. Unfortunately, Obama’s staffers weren’t interested. Instead they gave the students some bluster about their own green initiatives and a copy of the endlessly exciting 2009 memorandum from the vice president on federal energy plans. According to McKibben:

“They refused to take the Carter-era panel that we brought with us and said they would continue their deliberative process to figure out what is appropriate for the White House someday. I told them it would be nice to deliberate as fast as possible, since that is the rate at which the planet’s climate is deteriorating.”

While the action failed in its objective, McKibben went on to give some context:

We did not succeed in what we set out to do except for the fact that tens of thousands of people up and down the East Coast got to see the panel and got to start thinking about how to get our most important piece of real estate off of coal. I’m also incredibly proud of the three students from Unity College who stood right up to these guys and explained to them that if they wanted to communicate about the greening of the government they should do something in a place where people pay attention.

Fortunately, this isn’t the end of the road for the solar panels. McKibben and the Unity College students are keeping them in a van parked two blocks away from the White House. They will be rolled out again on October 10th as part of a series of global warming and renewable energy events around the world called Global Work Party.

According to the organizing group 350.org, “the point is to do something that will help deal with global warming in your city or community.” Some world leaders have already pledged their participation, such as Maldives president Mohamed Nasheed, who, according to McKibben, “will be on the roof of his official residence bolting down panels donated by the American company Sungevity.” At least one head of state gets it.

Over at Foreign Policy magazine, Stephen Walt wrote about an interesting development in the tennis world that relates to nonviolence. In the men’s doubles championship finals at the U.S. Open today, the number one ranked Bryan brothers faced an unlikely duo: Rohan Bopanna of India and Aisam-ul-Haq Qureshi of Pakistan. As Walt notes:

Bopanna and Qureshi view their partnership as symbol of the possibility of improved relations between their two countries — among other things, they sometimes wear t-shirts reading “Stop War, Start Tennis” — and their success at this year’s tournament even got the two countries’ U.N. ambassadors to sit together at one of their recent matches.

While the Bryan brothers prevailed in an extremely close match just minutes ago, in Bopanna and Qureshi I’ve found a team that I will be rooting for in the future.

Following the ins and outs of this largely media-inflated Qur’an-burning story has been no easy task. I was on the verge of writing about it several times, but then the story would take another unexpected left turn. The good news, however, is that regardless of the on-again, off-again status of the burning, it seems several groups are preparing to oppose the idea of such intolerance with a reading of the Qur’an.

The first notice I saw of this bold and much needed act of compassion came from the American Library Association, which will take to the steps of its headquarters in Chicago on Saturday afternoon for a public reading of the Muslim holy book. The ALA has also announced that it is moving the Qur’an to the top of the Banned Books Week agenda, which coincidentally begins two weeks from Saturday.

“The librarians of America will not stand by and let ignorance rule,” says ALA Executive Director Keith Michael Fiels. “For every would-be book burner, there are thousands of readers who will speak out for the freedom to peaceably assemble and read whatever they choose.”

Meanwhile, some fifteen religious leaders in Gainsville, Florida (where the burning is to take place) have agreed to read verses from the Qur’an during Sunday services. And in San Francisco, Rabbi Michael Learner has pledged to read from the Qur’an at a Rosh Hashanah service.

Hopefully these acts of compassion, tolerance and solidarity will carry us through whatever malevolent anti-Muslim events takes place this weekend.

Pelting Tony Blair with eggs and shoes at a public signing of his recently released autobiography is one way to protest the former British Prime Minister’s record on Iraq–albeit cruel and divisive. Thankfully, another protest that is explicitly nonviolent and far more creative has emerged.

Since Sunday, thousands of people have joined in support of a Facebook page called “Subversively move Tony Blair’s memoirs to the crime section in book shops.” There are already more than 200 photos of the book having been surreptitiously relocated. Many copies have also been turning up in the Dark Fantasy, Horror and Science Fiction sections, as well as the toiletries aisle in supermarkets.

According to the Telegraph:

Euan Booth, 24, a trainee nurse from Oxford, who helped set up the Facebook group, said he saw it as a good way of registering non-violent protest against the former Prime Minister.

He said: “I’m not an activist, just a voter who is still furious that he is able to lie to the British people, day after day, but this time earn money from it.

“This is a peaceful and mischievous way of making your point if you feel the same way. It’s a non-violent display of anger using the materials given to me – his book and the crime section – they’re both there, I just put them together.

“It was pretty funny seeing the book still in the same section this morning when I went back in to check.”

Nevertheless, the book has been selling incredibly well, which might lead some to call this form of protest a failure. But success and failure in this context are hard to measure. Sure the egg and shoe throwers helped get Blair’s subsequent public signings canceled—a measurable accomplishment, no doubt—but they did far less to stir the kind of inner thought that inspires action and leads to change.

While imprisoned after his 1967 Baltimore 4 action, Philip Berrigan, in his Prison Journals of a Priest Revolutionary, wrote:

When a people arbitrarily decides that this planet and its riches are to be divided unequally among equals, and that the only criterion for the division is the amount of naked power at its disposal, diplomacy tend to be essentially military, truth tends to be fiction, and the world tends to become a zoo without the benefit of cages. And war tends to be the ultimate rationality, because reason has been bankrupted of human alternatives (5).

Post-Vietnam, the American political, economic, and militaristic landscape described by Berrigan had worsened. The “naked power” of the United States now included an arsenal of 30,000 nuclear warheads and a first-strike policy. On September 9th, 1980, Berrigan and seven others said a decisive “NO!” to nuclear madness by entering the General Electric Re-entry Division in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania.  Along with Philip, Fr. Daniel Berrigan (his brother), Sr. Anne Montgomery, Elmer Maas, Molly Rush, Dean Hammer, Fr. Carl Kabat, and John Schuchardt hammered on two nose cones of Mark 12A warheads, poured their own blood on warhead documents and order forms, and prayed for disarmament and peace. With this act, the first of over 75 Plowshares disarmament actions came into being. The “Plowshares disarmament movement” is now international in scope. Many of its activists, who understand that waging peace has its price, have served a substantial amount of time in prison.

Art Laffin, a lifelong Plowshares activist and community member of the Dorothy Day Catholic Worker House in Washington, DC, speaks to what Plowshares activists hope to communicate through their actions in his introduction to Swords Into Plowshares: A Chronology of Plowshares Disarmament Actions:

…[there is an] underlying faith that the power of nonviolent love can overcome the forces of violence; a reverence for the sacredness of all life and creation; a plea for justice for victims of poverty, the arms race and economic sanctions; and acceptance of personal responsibility for the dismantling and physical conversion of the weapons; and a spiritual conversion of the heart to the way of justice and reconciliation (3).

In this same introduction, he explains why hammers and blood are or have been used in Plowshares actions. Hammers are used to begin the literal dismantling of weapons that rounds of “peace” talks have failed to do. They are also used to symbolize the “building again” process, e.g., a hammer can be used to build homes and hospitals. Blood clearly points to the blood that is spilled so carelessly in war. It is also an essential component of life, which points to our need for one another and our unity as one people.  In their nonviolent actions and their acceptance of responsibility for their actions, Plowshares activists are those who accept suffering rather than to impose it upon other people, as is done, for example, in the waging of armed conflict.

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

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

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

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• Over a million people flooded the boulevards of cities from Paris to Marseille on Tuesday to protest the government’s proposals to change the pensions system.

• Several teachers staged a protest in front of the Iranian parliament to protest the firing of their part time colleagues.

• About 120 inmates at the Monterey County jail are continuing a hunger strike that began last Wednesday to protest a new policy that reduced their allotments of soap.

• Several dozen food-service workers at George Mason University went on strike yesterday to protest working conditions in the dining halls.

• A “flash mob” of some 200 people gathered in front of the regional governor’s office in the western Russian city of Samara to protest the disallowing of some candidates to register for upcoming elections.

While the mainstream media has focused on the recent violence that has occurred as peace talks between Israelis and Palestinians, there are nevertheless still signs of hope.

After Palestinian 4-year-old Abdul Hai Salhut died last week, having sustained grave injuries in an accident at his family’s home in the Jabal Al-Mukabbir village in occupied East Jerusalem, his parents decided to donate his organs.

Abdul’s liver and lungs were successfully transplanted into three Israelis, saving their lives. In a remarkable statement, Moussa Salhut, the child’s father, told Ynet:

“We’re happy to see him alive in other people, regardless of whether they are Arab or Jewish. It doesn’t make a difference when you save life. In the shadow of our difficult loss, we are touched to have saved lives.”

This story, which has been completely ignored by the US media, reminds me of Ahmed Ismail Khatib, a 12-year-old Palestinian, whose parents donated his organs “for the sake of peace between the two people” after he was mistakenly shot by the IDF in 2005. His story is captured in Heart of Jenin, a documentary that ran on PBS (and can be viewed in full here) and was nominated for an Emmy this year.

Our friends who took part in Disarm Now Plowshares last November were indicted by a federal grand jury on Friday and will appear in U.S. District Court in Tacoma for arraignment on September 24, 2010, at 1:30 p.m.

If the five activists are found guilty on charges of “conspiracy, trespass, destruction of property on a naval installation, and depredation of government property,” they could each face up to 10 years in prison and a $250,000 fine.

The group’s website recaps the action and has some great quotes from the activists about how they’re taking the news:

…they entered Naval Base Kitsap-Bangor in the early morning hours of November 2, 2009, All Souls Day, with the intention of calling attention to the illegality and immorality of the existence of the Trident weapons system.

During the action they held a banner saying…“Disarm Now Plowshares : Trident: Illegal + Immoral”,  left a trail of blood, hammered on the roadway and fences around Strategic Weapons Facility – Pacific (SWFPAC) and scattered sunflower seeds throughout the base.  They gained entry to the secure nuclear weapons storage facility known as Strategic Weapons Facility-Pacific (SWFPAC) where they were detained, and after extensive questioning by base security, FBI and Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS), cited for trespass and destruction of government property, given ban and bar letters and released.

[...]

Bichsel said he feels compelled by his faith to continue risking his freedom for peace, despite two open-heart surgeries that require him to take frequent rests during even light exertion.  “The power of the resurrection is much stronger than our destructive ways,” he said. “I believe the presence of God made manifest through the witness of nonviolent action will break the bonds of fear, hopelessness, and death in which nuclear weapons imprison us.”

[...]

Kelly said he expects the Disarm Now Plowshares trial to be “another act of resistance” because the government will try to limit what the defendants have to say about nuclear weapons and war. The judicial body functions as a legitimizer of nuclear weapons, Kelly said. “Our actions, which could be part of the solutions, are deemed illegal, because nuclear weapons are legal,” so that courtroom becomes a place of further resistance.”