• At least a thousand Peruvian activists and provincial politicians marched into Lima on Thursday to protest billions of dollars in government-backed mining projects proposed by foreign firms.

• A strike by Israel’s largest labor federation shut banks, ports, the stock exchange and most government offices on Thursday to protest conditions for contract employees.

• Thousands of Jordanian teachers went on strike Wednesday for the third consecutive day to demand a sharp increase in their salaries, forcing a closure of classrooms across the kingdom.

• Hundreds of New York City students walked out of school on Wednesday to protest planned education budget cuts.

• Thousands of protesters rallied outside Athens Parliament on Tuesday, as the nation held another 24-hour strike against austerity measures.

• On Tuesday, families of Palestinian prisoners, held in Israeli jails, held their relatives pictures during a protest in front of the International Committee of the Red Cross offices in the West Bank town of Ramallah.

On January 26, a group of activists with Organizing for Occupation (O4O), Housing is a Human Right and Occupy Wall Street interrupted another foreclosure action in Brooklyn with their singing. (Frida Berrigan reported on the first of these actions back in October.) As you can see from the above video, after selling only one house out of four, the auction was aborted and 39 people were arrested.

In an email interview with Karen Gargamelli, an attorney with Common Law who is involved with O4O, she explains why they have chosen this melodic tactic:

We sing because it is non-violent and because it is beautiful. We hope to confound the systems that evict New Yorkers (the courts) and the elected officials that refuse to regulate the big banks with loveliness.

With this easy-to-learn song, O4O hopes these blockades will spread across the country, and effect what Gargamelli called “a people’s moratorium” that would create “real negotiating power between homeowners and lenders.” The next singing auction blockade is planned for February 17th in Queens.

During Argentina’s dirty war in the 1970s and 1980s, in which the military government assassinated thousands of citizens, a group of determined women who had lost their sons and daughters to this tsunami of political repression stood up. The Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo did what few others were willing to: publicly defy this state-sponsored reign of terror by breaking the silence and challenging the chilling paralysis that kept it stolidly in place. They did this by using the most powerful symbol at their disposal, their own vulnerable bodies, as they marched over and over again for years at great risk in front of the presidential palace with their implacable message: “You took them away alive—we want them returned alive.”

Governments quite easily take life. No government, however, has yet discovered how to return it.

The mothers named this state-sponsored killing “assassinations” and the killers “assassins.” The murders were politically motivated, carried out in secret, and covered up. In addition, they bore another important connotation of “assassination”: prominence. To their mothers, these women and men were as eminent and distinguished as any public figure—and only grew more so in death.

This immense violence is unspeakable. This is true not only because words fail to convey the horror of this particular case of terrorism, but also in the sense that theologian and activist James W. Douglass (drawing on the American monk Thomas Merton’s notion of The Unspeakable) means: “an evil whose depth and deceit seemed to go beyond the capacity of words to describe… a systemic evil that defies speech.”

Since the mid-1990s, Douglass has peered clearly into the void of The Unspeakable by making a protracted study of assassination and its meaning. His raft of books on the power of nonviolent action that preceded this focus—including Resistance and Contemplation and The Nonviolent Coming of God— prepared him to unearth the place of premeditated, targeted killing in the maintenance of the state; in the reinforcement of a culture rooted in the saving power of violence; and (as Douglass brilliantly and soberly illuminates) in the attempt by systems of domination to suppress and extinguish the nonviolent option.  For fifteen years he has been engaged in a long-term research and publishing project focused on the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, and Robert F. Kennedy.

The first book that appeared was JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters. This carefully researched study, published in 2008, tracks President Kennedy’s gradual shift from a traditional Cold Warrior to a covert peacemaker who was engaging with his putative enemies to defuse volatile international crises and to attempt to build a more enduring peace on the major fronts of his day, including Vietnam, Berlin, Indonesia, Cuba, and the barreling nuclear arms race. Douglass assembles convincing evidence that Kennedy was assassinated because of this pursuit of the nonviolent alternative.

Before completing his next projects on King and Malcolm X, though, Douglass began researching the assassination of Mohandas Gandhi. As he explained in a 2011 talk at Marquette University, it increasingly became evident to him that what he was discovering about Gandhi’s assassination could shed light on the dynamics of the assassinations that took place in the U.S. in the 1960s.

This week—as we marked the sixty-fourth anniversary of Gandhi’s death on January 30—Douglass published the fruit of this research: Gandhi and the Unspeakable: His Final Experiment with Truth (Orbis Books). This summary highlights Douglass’s findings:

While researching [the Kennedy assassination], Douglass learned from Arun Gandhi, grandson of the Indian liberation leader, that his grandfather had been killed by a conspiracy involving powerful nationalist forces within the Indian government—not a lone gunman. This led to Douglass’s rigorously investigating thousands of documents on Gandhi’s 1948 murder. He now provides readers with a slim, elegant volume containing explosive insight into who conspired to assassinate the father of modern nonviolence and why. “Gandhi’s murder, followed by the repression of its truth,” writes Douglass, “forms a paradigm of killing and deceitful cover-up that U.S. citizens would soon have to confront in our own government.” No other contemporary writer is exposing the mechanics of assassination as methodically and bravely as Douglass. But because he is a Catholic independent scholar and activist most well-known for his writings on nonviolence and suffering, this book is more than a fresh look at historical circumstances: it’s spiritual spelunking into the depravity of unchecked political power.

Douglass has devoted his life to illuminating the potential of nonviolent action to create options in a world caught in a web of violent and unjust forces—especially by engaging with, having faith in, and loving the enemy. He has done this through his writing, but even more importantly, he has done this by pursuing his own Gandhian experiments with truth. Here are two examples.

In 1979 Douglass, Rosemary Powers and John Clark engaged in nonviolent action at Naval Submarine Base Bangor, the Pacific homeport for the U.S. Navy’s Trident submarine fleet in Washington State. They scrambled over a security fence with the hope of making their way to the Strategic Weapons Facility Pacific (SWFPAC), a nuclear weapons storage area at the center of the base. As Douglass wrote in “Pilgrimage to Ground Zero” in Sojourners magazine (March 1980):

Our plan was to walk through Bangor’s woods, crossing six roads patrolled by naval security, and eventually climb over SWFPAC’s two high security fences in order to pray at “the physical site of an evil we all refuse to see, and thus refuse to take responsibility for”—as we put it in our advance leaflet to the Marines, passed out at the base three weeks earlier.

In the course of our pilgrimage to SWFPAC we spent 12 hours undetected on the base, continuously pursued by helicopters, civilian security guards, the Naval Intelligence Service, and hundreds of Marines as we climbed fences and crawled through the brush… We were finally arrested near a conventional weapons site just short of the high-security fences of SWFPAC.

In meditating on this anti-nuclear pilgrimage, Douglass noted the urgency of finding a way to “break the hypnotic spell nuclear weapons have over America.” He explained that:

After reflecting on the absurdity of the situation—what does one do in the presence of an H-bomb?—we decided that the only thing we could do was to go to SWFPAC, in a pilgrimage to that point of responsibility. Once there, we could only ask God’s forgiveness and mercy for our responsibility in creating such weapons, and pray for the power to be transformed in our collective conscience to a responsible, loving people capable of disarmament.

The following year—on January 6, 1980, the Feast of the Epiphany—Douglass and Clark again made their way inside the base. After not being detected on the grounds of the 7,000 acre facility the first day, they spent an all-night vigil in the woods in preparation for the next day’s events:

The next morning we used stepping stools and rug remnants to climb over the 12 foot-high double security fences enclosing SWFPAC… We walked alone and unimpeded to the first nuclear bunker. It was like a tomb—huge sliding concrete slabs shut under a small mountain of earth. We stood in silence for several minutes on the concrete entry, joined hands, and said aloud the Lord’s Prayer and the Hail Mary. Then we walked on to the next bunker, and prayed there in the same way. We continued our nuclear Stations of the Cross for six bunkers before we were arrested.

The spirit of this Gandhian nonviolence is also conveyed in the text of the leaflet distributed to the Marines at the base beforehand:

We know that it is your responsibility to guard these nuclear sites. We ask you to consider carefully in advance our attempt to join you there. We know that by government regulations you are “authorized to use deadly force” in protecting nuclear weapons. Brothers, we ask instead that you lay down your arms, for the sake of all our lives. We know that you are good people, and that you love and respect life.

Like the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo—whose courageous vulnerability contributed significantly to the nonviolent struggle for the eventual restoration of democracy in Argentina—James W. Douglass in these and many other actions has communicated his hope for profound social transformation in his own vulnerable body. And like Gandhi—whose vision and embodiment of soul-force continues to challenge and change our world—his hope has been enduringly vested in a transformed relationship with the enemy.

In this time of a growing national security state which increasingly depends on the proliferation of “targeted killings”—one of the faces of The Unspeakable today—may each of us be inspired by Douglass’s words and deeds to take nonviolent action to transform our lives and our world.

Minnesota winters can be brutally cold, full of ice and snow, and drearily bleak come this time of year. And while this year’s winter has been unexpectedly mild and inconsistent, with temperatures fluctuating from well-below freezing to the high 40s—likely due to the instability of climate change—we still look for ways to escape cabin fever. The Frozen River Film Festival (FRFF), on the banks of the Mississippi River in Winona, Minnesota, was just the break I needed. But it was also an inspiring weekend full of hopeful films, cinematic social critique, information tables, and workshops on the environment and activism.

The festival, which began in Winona in 2006, shows films from Mountainfilm—a film festival held in Telluride, Colorado in May that takes its films on tour throughout the rest of the year. Mountainfilm “is dedicated to educating and inspiring audiences about issues that matter, cultures worth exploring, environments worth preserving and conversations worth sustaining.” Likewise, the FRFF—whose films are a combination of the Mountainfilm Tour and locally or regionally-submitted films—has a similar mission:

The Frozen River Film Festival identifies and offers programs that engage, educate and activate viewers to become involved in the world. These programs provide a unique perspective on environmental issues, sustainable communities and extreme sports.

For Winona, the festival is also a time to learn and celebrate the unique landscapes and fertile soils of the Mississippi driftless area that was carved out during the last glacial age. FRFF Director, Crystal Hegge, highlighted the new film about regional legend Aldo Leopold, Green Fire: Aldo Leopold and a Land Ethic for Our Time, that capture’s the conservationist character of the festival: “(Viewers) will be able to ask questions about what’s going on here in Winona, and how they’re utilizing [Leopold's] message and creating a great landscape for the Winona community.” In a small community like Winona, the festival really brings the community together for important conversations that are sparked by the common experiences of viewing a film and hearing rarely-told stories.

One of those rarely told stories, and winner of the FRFF People’s Choice Award, is Dakota 38. The film is a moving re-telling of the mass execution of 38 Dakota men who were hanged on December 26, 1862 by the order of President Lincoln in Mankato, Minnesota. The film is a stark reminder of the ugly and often unjust history of how the Dakota were forcibly and violently removed from their ancestral lands, including Winona, and how little of that history most Minnesotans actually know. Nonetheless, the film retraces a healing journey for Jim Miller—whose vivid dream of the execution sparked the journey—and others who decided to ride 330 miles on horseback to arrive at the hanging site on the anniversary of the execution.

David Holbrooke, Festival Director for Mountainfilm, spoke with me over the phone about the role film and festivals can have in positive social change. “The documentarian is one of the last of the truth tellers,” Holbrooke said, “and we celebrate those filmmakers and storytellers who bring issues to light in untarnished ways.” Mountainfilm’s origins, telling the stories of climbers and mountaineers, were about doing things that haven’t been done. At its core, Holbrooke sees Mountainfilm as being about pushing the limits about what is possible and going places where others have not gone.

The intersection of sports, culture, and the environment appeals to a large swath of people—some of whom are already engaged in issues of social change, but many who are not. Each block of film sessions contains anywhere between two to six films that vary in length from as short as a couple of minutes to as long as a feature-length film that is guaranteed to pique one’s imagination and raise the consciousness to a new level.

The films are an eclectic mix that really do inspire, educate, awe, and touch the viewer in many different ways; some do so very deeply, such as The Economics of Happiness which reveals the serious social, economic, political, and environment challenges humanity faces. But when the film, which tells about the ills of globalization, ends on a hopeful note about the positive and successful potential of “localization,” the viewer is inspired to hook up with one of the many practical alternatives or organizations documented in the film. The Economics of Happiness was also paired up with two other films: Mr. Happy Man and Yelp. There was a unique pedagogical process at work in that Saturday evening film session. In Mr. Happy Man, we meet Bermudan Johnny Barnes who spends his days standing on a busy intersection spreading his love to all who pass by. It is a simple, genuinely love-filled gesture that spills out even across the silver screen. Following that uplifting exposé, Yelp‘s rant against technology causes the viewer to ponder the distraction and disruption that technology may be causing in our lives. The film ends with a climatic crescendo, urging us to “UNPLUG!” After having been calmed by Johnny Barnes and willfully considering our relationship to technology, The Economics of Happiness gives a coherent and digestible debunking of capitalism’s growth at all costs and how it is effecting the planet, communities, and individuals while modestly presenting viable alternatives. The filmmakers are even hosting a conference featuring the film’s interviewees in March.

“The world can be a better place than it is now and our filmmakers and guests [speakers] help us get there” said Holbrooke, who first saw the now Academy Award-nominated film Gasland at the Sundance festival and then played it at the Mountainfilm in 2010. “I had never heard of fracking until Gasland,” admitted Holbrooke. “And it’s happening miles from us in Telluride. It’s happening miles from my home in Brooklyn.” Past guests at Mountainfilm have included Tim DeChristopher and Port Arthur, Texas community organizer and Goldman Environmental Prize winner Hilton Kelley, who is featured in this year’s tour film My Toxic Reality.

“We look for people who are out changing the world. We need hope and solutions and we want to tell the stories of those who are fighting for what they believe in. We are in extraordinary times and we need extraordinary people taking extraordinary measures. Mountainfilm celebrates those people.” At the FRFF, one of those people is Jim Tittle. Clips from his forth-coming documentary on silica-sand mining (a key ingredient needed for fracking), The Price of Sand, debuted for the Mississippi River community that is facing the growing threat of such mining that creates open pit mines along the river and in nearby farm country. The film screening was accompanied by a panel discussion and also included opportunities for folks to get involved with organizing against the mining companies to pass town and country ordinances in favor of protecting the river bluffs.

In a testament to the role arts and film have in organizing and training activists, Peaceful Uprising, the organization co-founded by the now-imprisoned climate activist DeChristopher, had a powerful presence over the weekend by leading a workshop on civil disobedience—attended by about twenty people—and presenting the film-in-the-making Bidder 70. Hegge met Peaceful Uprising in Telluride at Mountainfilm’s 2011 festival and invited them to the FRFF.

When Ken Butigan writes about “mainstreaming nonviolence,” I think workshops on civil disobedience and nonviolence at film festivals (and well attended, for a small town like Winona) may just be what he had in mind. It is exciting to see the tools and awareness needed for nonviolent social change becoming more commonplace and celebrated.

• Thousands of Yemenis protested on Sunday against an immunity law protecting  outgoing President Ali Abdullah Saleh from prosecution and demanded he be put on  trial for offences they say he committed during his 33-year rule.

• More than 50 students from Tuscon High School walked out of class on Monday and marched toward Santa Rita Park in protest of the recent ban on Mexican American studies at TUSD schools.

• In Egypt, dozens of employees at the state-run Nile News TV Channel started an open-ended strike Sunday at the Maspero building, as they protested policies still in place since Mubarak’s rule.

• Malawi lawyers across the country Monday protested in their court regalia to pressure the governement to act on the ongoing judiciary strike.

• Truck drivers across Italy went on strike on Monday against increased fuel prices, while taxis also held a national protest over government reforms to increase competition, causing disruptions nationwide.

• Scores of protests were held across the country on Friday to protest the second anniversary of the Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling, which ruled corporations have a right to spend unlimited amounts of money on political campaigns. A dozen demonstrators were arrested on the U.S. Supreme Court steps.

• In Lebanon, severe electricity cuts fueled several protests Friday as residents and  lawmakers staged a sit-in in the mountain town of Aley and small groups of protesters blocked roads in the south of the country.

• Several women and children staged a sit-in outside the Karachi Press Club (KPC) on Friday to protest against the kidnapping of Baloch youths and the dumping of their bodies in different parts of the province.

• Protests in two West Bank universities have shut down classes in recent days, as students call for easing of tuition fees amid financial crisis in Palestine.

• Beginning last Tuesday, about 100,000 teachers from 24,000 non-government primary schools in Bangladesh held a three-day strike to demand that they be brought onto the government’s payroll.

They were a hit. But I had not studied my guide very carefully, and once they started clamoring for dog and cat and dragon balloon animals, I was deeply out of my element.

“A wand, what about a magic wand?” I improvised with the first little boy who asked for a dog balloon. I whipped it up quick and handed it to him with a Harry Potteresque flourish. “There, now you can do magic.”

“Cool,” he replied, “a sword!” and he dashed off to engage his little brother.

Soon all the kids were crowded around my knees demanding (politely) swords in all the colors of the rainbows. “I will make you a magic wand,” I insisted to each, manipulating the top of the long balloons into fanciful wand like shapes. “Okay, but I am going to turn it into a sword,” they said again and again, undoing my handiwork at the top of the wands and swashbuckling their ways across the church hall. It went on like this all morning. The only child I could get to request a magic wand was my very own Rosena, and even she used it like a sword the minute it was in her little hands.

My brother and sister and I grew up in a pacifist anti-nuclear community, conversant in the dark corners of Mutual Assured Destruction and nuclear winters from an early age. Living with so many different people over the years, we were exposed to all sorts of ways that good hearted, radical, thoughtful people interact with children.

At nightly prayer there were a number of women who insisted on saying “awoman,” instead of “amen.” I was so influenced by this that I took to calling mayonnaise “womanaise.”

At dinner, we were exposed to your garden variety vegetarians and vegans (and a lot of lectures about same), but also raw foodists, people who only drank juice and those who weighed all their portions. We also sat down with people who used kelp instead of salt and who railed against white sugar as though it were a tool of Satan himself (or herself?). Everyone took turns cooking, and we’d watch our dad carefully. If he got out the peanut butter at dinner it meant that he did not like what was being served—he would never say anything—and we could eat just peanut butter sandwiches too.

A lesbian woman who lived with us taught us to say “directly forward” when we were giving directions, instead of “straight.” Her point was that the dominant (male) culture prioritized straight over other directions and made us think that straight was the only way to live. I think that was her point, anyway. Whatever it was, it must have worked, because our sister is a lesbian. (Ha.)

By way of contrast, our own parents—as a former nun and priest and often at least a decade older than other community members—were fairly conventional (strange to say) in their child-rearing techniques. Please, thank you, eating all one’s dinner so as not to thumb one’s first-world chubby nose at the starving children of Africa, may I please be excused, long lectures about one’s behavior (differentiated from other kids’ long lectures only by the frequent, learned, biblical references and occasional diatribe against morally corrupted American consumer culture), occasional spankings.

You get the picture. They were kind of normal—at least compared to the other people we lived with, and if you set aside the whole protesting and getting arrested and going to jail and talking about one’s faith all the time stuff. They ate meat, drank alcohol (though it was seldom on hand at home), enjoyed classical music, cursed with passion and imagination when provoked, and enjoyed detective novels.

We were not allowed to watch TV (morally corrupted American consumer culture). The worst thing we could do was fight with one another (which my brother and I did constantly; a peace accord was signed in high school). The second-worst thing we could do was lie, which my brother and I did all the time to cover up for our TV-sneaking and our fighting.

I learned a lot from the people I shared the dining room table with growing up—but less about healthy eating than about obsession and fixation and control. I learned to work around my parents’ prohibitions on TV and gorged myself on it when I could. (To this day, if a TV is on in a room, I can’t not watch it.) I learned to lie to be able to do what I wanted and still be an appropriate peace activist kid. I’m not proud of learning all of that. I don’t like it… but I did it.

Disclaimer Needed, though: Food obsessions and lying is not all I learned from my parents and all those other good folks. My point is that the lessons adults want to impart are not always what is learned by the kid.

I have been thinking about all of this because now I live with a five-year-old wonder half of every week. Does it really matter if she plays with magic wands or swords? Why do I want her to call it a wand when she wields it like a sword? If she is having fun and not hurting anyone, does my politically-correct overlay do anyone any good? Or is it just a semantic absurdism like womanaise?

What do we teach children by our words and actions? What do we want children to learn? What happens when what we teach and what they learn are not the same thing?  How can I be a parent who is learning right alongside this marvelous five-year-old rather than imposing my vision of the world on her little shoulders? How can I be a parent who makes the world safe, beautiful and governed by some logic (while still being honest about its morass of problems and our responsibility for all of that) for the tiny four-month-old being growing inside of me?

Children are little insurrections. They turn our lives upside down and they insist we see it through their eyes—and they care more than anything about fairness and friendship. Maybe we have more to learn than to teach.

Members of Occupy Chicago and other groups protested the draconian law that further criminalizes dissent by making protest more costly and more restricted for citizens.

Emmanuel, using the upcoming NATO-G8 summit that is set to take place in Chicago this May as an opportunity to foment fear of protesters, used the legislation to limit access to public parks and beaches, increase the costs and requirements for obtaining permits, and give unilateral power to himself and Chicago Police to quickly deputize law enforcement officers and obtain special equipment for dealing with protests.

Initial proposals in the ordinance to increase minimum fines for obstructing or resisting a police officer from $25 to $200 and maximum fines from $500 to $1000 were not a part of the final bill—in large part due to the massive outrage from civil liberties and social justice groups in Chicago.

Truthout’s Yana Kunichoff gives a full report.

Nonviolent social movement organizations will have to think creatively about how these changes will effect their activism. Activists who have long been accustomed to small fines and convivial police may have to consider further acts of noncooperation that may include jail time for refusal to pay fines that they consider unjust.

Solidarity across issue-based groups and solid organizing may be the best way to make the enforcement of these laws untenable. If protesters refuse to pay the fines and force judges and the city to fill the jails, history has taught time and again that an unsustainable situation is created for the power holders.

So long as protesters are willing to suffer the hardships and inconvenience of noncooperation and jail, thereby gaining sympathy from the wider public—a hallmark of Gandhian nonviolence that the Civil Rights movement extolled–the City of Chicago may be forced to re-evaluate its position.

I woke up early this morning to cook breakfast for what remains of the Witness Against Torture community. After almost two weeks, it was the first time one of us had cooked for each other, and as I sat down to reflect on our time here in Washington, D.C. for the “Hunger for Justice” campaign that so many have participated in, I find myself looking forward to be able to take a break. Most of my writing, time, organizing and reflection have dealt with some aspect of torture or detention and, to be honest, I have grown weary. I miss the work on the farm. I miss family and community. I miss being able to walk through the woods or enjoy a quite cup of coffee while reading esoteric political philosophy. And then it dawns on me. Those desires I yearn for and enjoy are the reason I am part of Witness Against Torture (WAT).

I had very little hesitation pulling the black hood over my eyes as I approached the White House sidewalk with almost 40 other Witness Against Torture activists yesterday. As a community, we were on day ten of a liquids-only fast and had plans to break it with a communal meal that evening. But there was always the chance that most of us would end up in jail for an uncomfortable night of restlessness, hunger, and stress and delay the breaking of our fast until morning. Still, the thought of a couple days in jail in exchange for a visible act of resistance to U.S. policies of torture and detention and an expression of solidarity to the men in Guantánamo was worth it.

We pulled our cage with a “Guantánamo prisoner” onto the sidewalk and we spread out—in the infamous orange jumpsuits and black hoods—along the pristine yet protective fence that secures the sanctity of the White House. The police quickly informed us that we were not welcome and that we had to disperse and move the cage. Some of us sat down around it, making clear our intention that we would have to be forcibly removed. The day marked the start of Guantánamo’s eleventh year and followed the January 11th day of action—the largest-ever protest against the prison and issues of indefinite detention, including the recent passage of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA).

After three hours on the cold sidewalk, the police began making arrests. We were assigned identification numbers, photographed, and detained in police cruisers and holding cells for a few hours before being released with a notice to appear in court in early February. All things considered—especially with the prisoners of Guantánamo weighing heavy on our hearts—it was a cakewalk. The mild discomfort of fasting, hours in plastic handcuffs, metal seats, and a rough ride in the back of a police van pale in comparison to the indefinite detention of innocent men and the physical and psychological torture they have received. Lawyers for the men in Guantánamo communicated to us that their clients were going to hold a three-day hunger strike. According to our friends at the Center for Constitutional Rights:

multiple clients have told counsel that the men at GTMO were so moved to find out that we were planning a big public demo that they have decided to try and hold a peaceful protest in solidarity *with us* and to protest the ongoing injustice of 10 years of indefinite detention at GTMO! We know there is buy into this among the men at Camps 5 and 6. Camp 6 is communal and there will be hunger strikes and peaceful sit-ins, with signs prepared. Camp 5 is more restrictive, so no communal sit-ins, but a protest involving a refusal to accept food for 3 days. The men informed camp guards about their intentions and reasoning on Monday night, and aim to peacefully protest on Jan 10, 11, and 12. We won’t know in real time if they were successful or were stopped — but we know that men on every cell block in camp 6 will seek to do this, and that men in Camp 5 will participate as well.

Of course it is we who are acting in solidarity with them. It is their plight we wish to draw attention to. It is their imprisonment we condemn. Our fast was an expression of our repentance for their continued mistreatment by the hands of a government that is supposed to represent us. Our protest, direct action, and civil resistance are our attempts to bring the illegitimacy, illegality and shame of Guantánamo and indefinite detention back into public purview for condemnation and closure. Our own brief detention and experience in the “justice system” is our meager expression of solidarity for their profound experience of prison and contrived courts and military tribunals.

The police released us just in time for us to break the fast together, but they kept our cage. All in all, it was a good couple of weeks of community, education, protest, media coverage, outreach, coalition building and nonviolent action. Interestingly, the fast has weakened our bodies but strengthened our resolve. We have another trial date—which is more than those in Guantánamo or Bagram can say—so our efforts continue. But the prison is still open and we—as a people and a nation—are perhaps in a worse-off political situation than we were a year ago. The political winds shift easily, but it seems unlikely that Guantánamo will close anytime soon. Meanwhile, the legitimacy of torture and unjust and inhumane detention practices are less scrutinized and more accepted than they were a decade ago.

Professor Juan Mendez, the UN rapporteur on torture and himself a survivor of torture, confirmed the bleak political reality for closing Guantánamo as we shared our first meal with him and members of the National Lawyers Guild chapter at American University School of Law. But the resistance is growing and the realization of our interconnectedness is deepening—especially at the grassroots level as evidenced by the Occupy movement’s protests against NDAA and the historic coalition of human rights groups on January 11. The new Close Guantanamo project has brought together a diverse group of individuals and communities to help facilitate the kind of knowledge that translates into action. When lawyers for the Guantánamo habeas cases took the stage at the January 11 rally, hundreds were voluntarily engaged in fasting and hunger strikes. Thousands more were engaged in protests around the world and we caught a fleeting glimpse of what a world united against torture might look like.

Looking forward, Witness Against Torture is asking itself what to do next. 2012 is a presidential election year and it is unlikely that politicians will willingly engage in questions regarding torture, detention or Guantánamo unless there is significant public pressure. Anti-torture and civil liberty groups have a lot of work to do in the public realm to raise awareness, educate and mobilize citizens. The upcoming trial date will be another opportunity to “put” Guantánamo and the NDAA on trial both in the courts and with the public. The coverage by mainstream media of the tenth anniversary of Guantánamo—in large part generated by our activism—is promising, as are the many op-eds calling for its closure.

WAT has grown tremendously since 25 people traveled to the Cuban prison to fast in 2005. Still, as a community we are asking ourselves what more can we do? In the coming months, in addition to preparing for our trial, we will take some time to think critically about what are the next steps necessary for closing Guantánamo. The fact that many of the prisoners at Guantánamo are encouraged by our actions helps us understand our work as having some effect—not the one we or the prisoners hope for—but worthwhile nonetheless. The American detention regime is complicated by both political and legal issues but never before have the issues of detention been so much in the spotlight. Regrettably, the passage of the NDAA reflects the difficult situation we are in. But with creativity and commitment Witness Against Torture’s work with grassroots activists to challenge the Guantánamo narrative will continue in whatever fashion we can. There will be conference calls and retreats, between now and next January to evaluate our past and plan for the future. Meanwhile the vigils, teach-ins, speak-outs, interviews and direct action will continue—always hoping but never knowing—until that tipping point to close Guantánamo is reached.

• Dozens of cars manned by Palestinians from the West Bank tried to leave Jericho on Tuesday morning in a non-violent protest action to protest and challenge the system of Israeli-only roads throughout the West Bank, but were stopped by Israeli forces, who blocked the four lanes entering and exiting the Palestinian city.

• On Monday, survivors of the 1984 Bhopal Gas Tragedy staged a protest at a park as part of the international campaign to demand that the Organizing Committee of the London Games set to begin from July 27, cancel the sponsorship by Dow Chemicals.

• Workers at consumer goods giant Unilever staged a noisy protest outside the firm’s London offices in a dispute over pensions which is set to escalate into a series of strikes starting next Tuesday.

• More than 9,000 lawyers boycotted court proceedings in Pakistan’s major cities on Tuesday in protest of a senior attorney’s slaying outside his home in Lahore.

• Workers at a Freeport McMoran mine in Indonesia on Tuesday halted their gradual return to work one day after gunmen shot two contractors dead on the road to the Grasberg mine.

• As many as 231 Air India flight attendants refused to work on Tuesday, which delayed four international flights, to protest non-payment of salaries and sustenance allowance since August.

“Rules are rules. The law is the law,” said prosecutor Brandon Long in a closing statements as he spoke for the government in the case against Witness Against Torture activists. Frida Berrigan’s recent column relates the details of the anti-torture activists trial and convictions for speaking out in the US House of Representatives as they petitioned their government to oppose the NDAA.

It struck me as odd that the government chose to frame its case in terms of law, order, and decorum so as to protect civil society and Congress from disruption so that business as usual may carry on while the legal black hole that is Guantanamo persists. Of course, it comes as no surprise that a civil disobedience trial is reduced to a mundane evidentiary trial of whether or not activists did or did not do a certain thing, in a certain place, at a certain time with no consideration given to the context or content of their speech/action.

In fact, it has become a quite commonplace—and effective—“tactic” for judges and prosecutors to appeal to the minute details of a statute so to ensure a finding of guilty rather than allow the courtroom to be a space for debate about the merits of the action’s political or moral dimensions. In cases of civil disobedience, judges are wont to avoid “judicial activism”—a term that refers to the departure from precedence and case law in a ruling that opens avenues for future legal defense that could acquit potential defendants.

Sure, there are the rare exceptions where the court allows arguments such as international law defense or the “necessity” defense to be taken under consideration as legitimate motivation for a defendant’s action. The trials of the Creech 14 and the Hancock 38 were such events, even though the judge still issued guilty rulings in both cases. Appeals to the First Amendment rights to freedom of speech, peaceably assemble, or petition the government for redress of grievance often fall on deaf ears while prosecutors vehemently object to the relevance of the First Amendment when a defendant is accused of failing to obey a lawful order or blocking an entrance. The application of such legal code against nonviolent protesters represents a covert assault on the First Amendment as well as the stratification of power in increasingly less-accessible places under the guise of maintaining the social order.

The court—the final arbiter of the state—cares more about decorum than it does about justice, truth, or democracy. So long as order is maintained, process is followed, and the courtroom kept clean from irrelevancies such as conscience or context, justice is served. What cares do the falsely accused, the unjustly imprisoned, or the abused (and their advocates)—whether they be in Guantanamo, Chicago, or an immigration detention center in anytown, USA—have for the observances of polite society while such grave injustices are bestowed upon them with such grace and dignity by their accusers and executioners?

With today marking the tenth anniversary of Guantanamo, Witness Against Torture is in the midst of a 24/7 “cage” vigil in front of the White House. During my shift of Monday evening, I had a lively conversation with a gentleman whom I can only assume was an intelligence officer—he would not tell me his job but said he had spent time in Pakistani prisons. “Look at your stupid costumes. It’s not like that,” he said pointing to our 4′x6′ prison cell with a chained prisoner in an orange jumpsuit and black hood sitting in the middle of Pennsylvania Avenue. He accosted our vigil to “Shut Down Guantanamo” as missing the point. “The prison is one of the best prisons in the world,” he chided me, referring to the first-class treatment some of the prisoners receive. And indeed it may be, considering it costs the US taxpayer $800,000 per prisoner per year to run the detention center. “There are much worse prisons here in the US that need to be closed. I’d rather be in Guantanamo Bay than Riker’s Island [in New York].” Again, there is some truth to that but it continues to miss the point.

Throughout our conversation, which was charged but worthwhile, he consistently affirmed that “our system works.” When I pressed him on the 89 men who have been cleared for release yet remain imprisoned indefinitely for no clear reason, he said it was unfortunate but that they will be released eventually. The fact that their status is “cleared”—which is itself problematic verbiage because more than 98 percent of the men in Guantanamo were never charged with something in the first place—is enough to prove that the system works, even if they remain imprisoned. That, to me, is a strange fashioning of justice.

Dr. King’s words, “justice delayed is justice denied” is a useful frame for understanding the perverted system of justice that is occurring at Guantanamo and in prisons in the U.S. An obsession with decorum, with process, runs the risk of mistaking the trees for the forest. And indeed that has happened as men in Guantanamo and immigrants and other Americans in prison have been locked up—many in a manner that feels or is indefinite because of lethargic administrative procedures and the whims of judges and prosecutors—they are asked to be patient with what many consider the best system of justice in the world.

And to some extent, that may be true. I don’t know. I’m not a lawyer or a legal historian. But I don’t believe that is a reasonable argument for the two million men, women, and children incarcerated in American prisons nor the untold thousands detained by U.S. military and intelligence agencies around the world. A system with flexibility, without creativity, without room to breath and grow and die and be re-born should be considered dead.

What does a typical courtroom in America feel like? Serious, rigid, intimidating… dead. Contrast that with the feel of a General Assembly at an Occupy site. Or a truth and reconciliation circle that is typical in indigenous communities and in ancient wisdom traditions. These places are filled with spirit and life. Both can be tedious and frustrating but when boundaries are elastic instead of bound by decorum, the imagination is activated and truth begins to seep in.

In spite of what the government may lead us to believe, decorum and democracy do not mix well together. Thousands of individuals learned first-hand what the experience of democracy is like: it is messy, time-consuming, resists being put into pre-fab boxes. Is that chaos? Hardly. Structure and order can facilitate democratic processes in way that creates space for truth and justice to be explored, challenged, pontificated, questioned, asserted, and debated by people with various styles and abilities to communicate. But when a clearly delineated process becomes the end goal as a standard of justice, the persons, histories, and contexts involved in the case are sidelined and a dangerous, undemocratic tunnel-vision emerges. A courtroom, generally, is not structured in an open, fluid way for candid dialogue because its intention, again, is not with truth and justice, but with fact and consequence. The poor and communities of color have especially known this, as have activists and sympathetic attorneys.

So rules and laws serve a purpose. But all too often that purpose is misconstrued and the rules and laws that are intended to serve that purpose are abused or misapplied. So while rules are rules and the law is the law, progress and positive change demand that rules and laws be broken so that the cages that confine human flourishing may be torn asunder and that spirit set free. Let us quit mistaking decorum for democracy.

The defendants file in—some looking neat and upstanding, some in their best approximation of the same. They all look tired. Sleeping on the floor of a church can do that to a person.

The white haired, slightly amused and always alert judge, the white noise machine when the lawyers confer with the judge, the stern and fit marshals, the wall to wall carpet and wood paneling. Yes—we are in a DC court. Take off your hats, gentlemen and ma’am, no knitting allowed in the court.

The matter before the court is unusual. The defendants are representing themselves, with legal advisors on hand. They stakes are high—if convicted, they could face up to a year in jail.

On June 23, 2011, a day the House of Representatives was scheduled to debate provisions that would eventually become the National Defense Authorization Act just signed into law by President Barack Obama that included a measure to strip funding from any efforts to repatriate Guantanamo detainees, fourteen activists stood one by one and addressed the men and women elected to represent their interests. Here is part of what they said:

Today the House of Representative is in the process of contemplating not the passage of a bill but the commission of a crime. Provisions in the proposed Defense Appropriations Bill grant the United States powers over the lives of detained men fitting of a totalitarian state that uses the law itself as an instrument of tyranny. The law would make the prison at Guantanamo permanent by denying funds for the transfer of men to the United States, even for prosecution in civilian courts.

Spread throughout the Gallery, the fourteen were able to complete their statements before being led away by Congressional guards. Many of the Representatives on the floor listened intently, while others jeered derisively. Everyone within hearing range understood that the activists were objecting to the continued abuse and detention of men at Guantanamo—many of whom have been cleared for release under President George W. Bush and President Barack Obama and continue to be held largely because of the political cowardice of Congress.

Only four completed the trial. The government failed to identify the other ten. One of the ones who went through the trial was Shakir Ami aka Brian Hynes.

Shakir Ami is not a name you hear every day in DC court. It is not exactly right, either. But its genesis is in an action Witness Against Torture did a few years ago at the Supreme Court, when 80 of us occupied those hallowed halls—shutting it down for (what we think is) the first time. None of us brought identification, opting to go through the system with the names of men at Guantanamo.

Thus, we symbolically brought them into the U.S. court system. For most of us, it meant just a very long processing through the DC jails and an opportunity to say the name of “our” defendant in a court of law. For some men at Guantanamo, it was the first (and some perhaps only) time their names were heard in the U.S. justice system. For Brian Hynes, it meant more—the correctional officers who processed Brian misspelled and garbled Shaker Aamer, rendering it Shakir Ami—but the symbolism remains striking and is pervasive. In the DC system, Shakir Ami is Brian Hynes’ alias and every time he is arrested, he’ll have an opportunity to talk about Shaker Aamer.

Aamer remains at Guantanamo. He is the last remaining British resident at Guantanamo. The rest were released years ago and have made documentaries, written books and become active in the international movement to shut down Guantanamo. Aamer is an educated man, born in Saudi Arabia but a legal resident of the United Kingdom who is married to a British national. He had been in Guantanamo for nearly ten years, and from early on was a leader amongst the prisoners, encouraging them to demand better conditions and organizing protests and hunger strikes in response to abuses. For this leadership, Aamer has been singled out for harsh treatment and remains in solitary confinement. In September, the BBC reported that Aamer was on hunger strike and being forcibly fed through a tube. In a letter quoted in the article, Aamer wrote that:

Inhumane treatment is taking place at the [Guantanamo] hospital among other areas, especially affecting the sick and those who are on (hunger) strike and our deprivation of real treatment, health, diet and appropriate clothing which are not provided to us, nor we are allowed to provide them for ourselves.

Shaker is the father of four. His youngest son Faris was born after he was in Guantanamo. They have never met or touched. Shaker was cleared for release from Guantanamo by the U.S. government in 2007, and yet he remains in Guantanamo.

None of the details about Shaker Aamer were admissible in the trial. Brian Hynes was interrupted and silenced every time he mentioned Shaker’s name. But the facts of Aamer’s case bear repeating as President Barack Obama used the New Year’s holiday to sign into law the National Defense Authorization Act, a piece of legislation that codifies into law a set of dangerous and controversial policies and protocols that have evolved over the last ten years of the global war on terror.

In response, the Center for Constitutional Rights wrote that it:

strongly condemns the U.S. Congress for passing, and President Obama for signing, the 2012 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which effectively endorses war without end and makes indefinite military detention without charge or trial a permanent feature of the American legal system. This is the first time since the McCarthy Era that Congress has written indefinite detention into law.

We had hoped that President Obama—a constitutional law professor and believer in the aspirational course of American justice—would uphold his promise to veto this radical law that threatens to roll back both decades-old legislation enacted to combat McCarthy-era excesses and 19^th-century limitations on domestic military policing. At the same time that heroic activists in the Arab world are risking their lives to rid themselves of the remnants of their authoritarian and militaristic regimes, the United States is embracing practices contrary to the basic aspirations of any constitutional democracy.

Brian Hynes and the three co-defendants rested their case on Wednesday. On Thursday they were found guilty. On Friday, the judge sentenced Mike Levinson to two days in jail and then suspended it, gave him 6 months unsupervised probation, told him not to engage in illegal activities on Capitol grounds or buildings for 6 months, and—in lieu of a fine—granted his wish to make a $150 charitable contribution to the organization of his choice. The rest of the defendants will be sentenced on Thursday, January 12.

This is not the end. It is the beginning. Opposition to the NDAA is coming from all quarters, and manifesting itself in flashmobs in Grand Central, arrests at the White House, and trials in Superior Court.

Our work continues in DC, as Witness Against Torture’s Hungering for Justice fast enters its fourth day and we gear up for “Ten Years Too Many: National Day of Action Against Guantanamo” on January 11.

We only wish the real Shaker Aamer and his family could join us.

Two back-to-back trials, stemming from civil resistance actions that took place May 7 and August 8 of last year, will be heard in the courtroom of Kitsap County District Court Judge James M. Riehl, who has indicated that he will allow the defendants to talk about why they blocked the road. In November he denied the government’s motion seeking to prevent the defendants from discussing nuclear weapons or international law. In what is likely to be a narrowly circumscribed way, these defendants will attempt to put nuclear weapons on trial, even as they are being tried.

In August, four of those in the Kitsap court moved a 44-foot inflatable Trident II D-5 missile replica onto the roadway to symbolically close the base. These included my colleague Betsy Lamb—a long-time advocate for justice and peace who graduated from a yearlong training program several of us facilitated at Pace e Bene Nonviolence Service—and Tom Rogers, a retired navy submarine commander. This was Rogers’s first arrest, which he discussed in a local newspaper interview:

It was the culmination of a process of discernment and deciding if it was the right time for me to do that. Getting arrested was a step I hadn’t taken. I’d been at Ground Zero for eight years and I’d been very active, I’d testified at trials, I’ve written things, I’ve done a lot of work. But I was always dubious about the value of getting arrested. Four of us decided we would symbolically close the base by dragging that big inflatable missile into the road, and closing the base. And that’s what we did…

In the years following the end of the Cold War, I became less and less comfortable with the concept of nuclear deterrents when there really wasn’t anybody out there that we were deterring. What we were doing was spending a whole lot of money not to be any safer. It made me mad as a former naval officer who dedicated my life to the Cold War–that’s what I did–and as a taxpayer, and as a resident of Kitsap County, because the continuing presence of the weapons at Bangor is a danger to people and the environment, even though the folks out there do as good a job as they can.

When he was asked if he felt justified breaking the law, he said:

In 1996 the international court of justice, which is the judicial arm of the United Nations, was asked for a judgment on whether nuclear weapons were illegal. And after a year of hearings and deliberations, they came back and said unequivocally, that the use or threat of use of nuclear weapons is illegal under international law. That came out of … the Geneva Accords. If you look at those, it’s obvious that the use of nuclear weapons is illegal under those accords.

Now here’s the leap. I believe that deployment of nuclear weapons on board Trident submarines that are on alert patrol and can shoot those weapons within 30 minutes at anybody in the world constitutes a continuing threat of use. So we believe that the United States is doing something illegal.

Tom Rogers’s arguments are virtually the same ones I heard in the early 1980s when I first joined the anti-nuclear weapons movement.

In 1982 I traveled with several other members of Spirit Affinity Group (the nonviolent action group I had recently joined while studying at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, Calif.) to western Washington to take part in a powerful nonviolent action organized by Ground Zero.

Founded in 1979 by Shelly Douglass and James W. Douglass, Ground Zero organized a series of civil disobedience actions at the Bangor base, which was the Pacific port of the Trident submarine fleet that was just then coming online. Robert Aldridge, who had quit his job at Lockheed where he was involved in the development of the Trident system’s sea-launched first-strike capability, inspired this campaign.

In the summer of 1982 the first Trident submarine, the USS Ohio, was scheduled to be armed for the first time.  Ground Zero organized a daring nonviolent reception for the Ohio in which it planned to deploy people in rowboats to meet the submarine as it glided on the surface of Puget Sound on its way to port.  If all went well, the plan was for the wet-suit clad nuclear resisters to clamber aboard the hull and offer the crew bread as a sign of life and nonviolent alternatives. In his account of this action, Matt Dundas writes that the 46 people who took part first underwent an intensive training and then, beginning on August 6, waited six days for the arrival of the Ohio:

On Thursday August 12, between 2 and 3 a.m., night watchers spotted large numbers of Coast Guard cutters stirring in the canal, and the activists were awakened. The group sprung into action, saying prayers, donning wetsuits, and boarding their meager vessels. But their publicity had preceded them. In a surprise move, the Coast Guard staged a preliminary seizure of several boats and protesters. Guardsmen carrying M-16s and handguns met them at their docks and made many arrests before the Ohio was even in sight.

In the ensuing confusion, a handful of boats got away, while others were overturned and flooded by the Coast Guard. Video footage taken at the time shows protesters getting washed overboard by high-powered Coast Guard hoses…

The boats that got away from the initial Coast Guard onslaught tore toward the “National Security Zone,” a 1000-yard perimeter around the submarine, a boundary that once crossed meant risking [a] ten-year prison sentence and $10,000 fine. Undeterred by the consequences, Ruth Youngdahl Nelson rode in her son Jon’s 16-foot motorized rubber boat as it raced from the law. A Coast Guard boat caught up with them and brought them to a halt. As a Guardsman on the cutter was about to hose the team into the sound, the 78-year-old Ms. Nelson declared boldly, “Young man, not in my America.” The Guardsman hesitated, and then lowered his hose as the group escaped for another run at the Ohio before finally being stopped and arrested.

Dozens of people were arrested. I was part of the support team for my affinity group members—Terry Messman, Darla Rucker, and Bruce Turner—who now lay face down on the deck of a Coast Guard cutter, for the moment a makeshift brig. I was in a canoe with Pat Runo, another member of Spirit, and a troupe of Buddhist monks who were soulfully beating their drums.  The sound had been choppy all day but now it was eerily quiet and smooth as glass. We circled the ship slowly again and again, with the drumbeat letting our friends know that they were not alone and offering a blessing to them and to the entire world, including their temporary captors.

Hours later the arrestees were transferred to buses and transported to King County Courthouse in nearby Seattle. Though they faced years in jail and large fines, their federal charges were quietly dropped a few months later.

This event proved pivotal for me. It gave me a glimpse into the power of nonviolent action and the state’s response to it. It demonstrated the willingness of human beings to take a nonviolent and determined stand, using the most powerful symbol they possess: their own vulnerable bodies. It even showed how such actions could help raise the visibility of one’s concern–there was enormous media coverage in the Pacific Northwest of the action but, more importantly, of the reality of the Trident submarine in our midst. As someone from Washington State, this was especially moving to me.

As our friends on trial this week know, this work is far from finished.

The anti-nuclear weapons movement is now in its seventh decade. In 2012 it calls each of us to find powerful, creative, and nonviolent ways to withdraw our consent from nuclearism’s still looming shadow and its central role in reinforcing systems of violence and injustice.

Historically, the NDAA was a spending bill that set the annual budget for the US military. Recently, the guaranteed passage of the NDAA has been used by legislators—in spite of vehement rhetorical opposition by progressive and GOP legislators, the bill still passed, unsurprisingly, with overwhelming support (86-13 with one abstaining in the Senate; 322-96 with eleven abstaining in the House)—to craft the policies and politics of the war on terror.

The same day President Obama signed the NDAA, activists with Witness Against Torture (WAT) began preparing for a January 3, 2012 trial to defend themselves against charges stemming from a June 2011 protest when they interrupted House of Representative deliberations on a Defense Appropriations Bill—a precursor to the final NDAA.

The reason for WAT’s protest was not the provision that allows the president to indefinitely detain anyone, anywhere, which was not included in the early drafts of the 2012 military spending bill. Rather WAT was protesting the provisions in the bill—which did make it into the NDAA—that establish the prison in Guantanamo Bay as a permanent fixture in U.S. foreign policy and seriously question America’s commitment to human and civil rights. Journalist Andy Worthington describes the provisions that make it near impossible to transfer detainees for trial in civilian courts or release them to foreign countries.

The uproar regarding the NDAA’s potential treatment of U.S. citizens as “enemy combatants,” without rights to counsel or trial, in the war on terror is simply the realization of a misguided, immoral, and ineffective domestic and foreign response to terrorism. The chickens are coming home to roost. The American legacy of the 2000s is one of torture, illegal domestic spying, the flouting of international law, and unconscionable detention practices. Meanwhile, nonviolent alternatives for effectively dealing with terrorists—such as a long-stalled potential rehabilitation center for Guantanamo detainees or peer-group centers that challenge and shift the narratives of Islamist terrorism (such as Abdul Haqq Baker and the STREET center that WNV favorite Tina Rosenberg has reported on)—are not given much official consideration.

Instead, the net of repression continues to grow as it extends across the planet and all its peoples. The U.S. and its people have not been troubled much by the men, women, and even children who languish in its military prisons—secret or otherwise—in Cuba, Bagram, Afghanistan, Bucharest, Romania and countless other global locations. As Witness Against Torture activists, whom I am joining, begin an 11-day Fast for Justice on behalf of all those indefinitely detained, will ordinary Americans recognize the global assault on freedom that the Bush and Obama administrations have waged for over a decade?

As Gitmo proves, the policy and practice of indefinite detention is not new. It’s only the latest in a long, ugly succession of unjust detentions ranging from American Indian boarding schools to Japanese internment camps to slave plantations and Abu Ghraib. Even if Americans are aghast at the NDAA’s contents that quite clearly contradict the constitutional right of habeas corpus we hold so dear, it is foolish to think this is just a naïve lapse of judgment by the keepers of our best interests. The cat was let out of the bag a long time ago. Recall the famous words of Martin Niemöller, the anti-Nazi pastor and pacifist:

First they came for the communists,
and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a communist.

Then they came for the trade unionists,
and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a trade unionist.

Then they came for the Jews,
and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a Jew.

Then they came for me
and there was no one left to speak out for me.

We have failed to speak out for prisoners detained the world over. President Obama enters the final year of his first term, and his landmark executive order to close Guantanamo has been reduced to little more than a prank played on hopeful supporters; 171 men remain imprisoned—more than 60 of whom were cleared for release years ago by President Bush. It is not too late to speak out for them—or ourselves, for that matter—but the sun is setting and the dark night of indefinite detention threatens to rise on friend and foe alike. Join us on January 11.

Vaclav Havel, the Czech poet and politician, who died on December 18, 2011.

Václav Havel often said we should live life “as if”—as if there is no oppression, as if we must set an example of life well-lived even under the weight of a coercive regime. His belief in the power of exemplary actions undertaken by ordinary people—as opposed to the more formal political acts of revolutionary leaders—set Havel’s approach to resistance apart. He did not ask for heroics. He recognized the revolutionary force of everyday examples: not bowing your head, not putting the picture of a tyrant on your wall, not voting in farcical elections, not hanging the party sign in your shop window. Havel’s hero was the greengrocer, the powerless, the everyday casualty of oppression. He insistently resisted the epithet “dissident” because he did not like the idea of recognizing only one or two people of extraordinary courage and repute. Instead, he felt that there are no small acts of resistance; any act, by anyone, has the potential of reverberating—of being absorbed and replicated, and leading to meaningful change. Of course, the context dictates the significance of the act, and an awareness of that environment makes for true political consciousness and authentic acts of resistance.

To paraphrase Jan Palach, the Czech student who died from self-immolation in protest against the Soviet occupation of Czechoslovakia in 1969, the purpose of “living in truth,” of acting out one’s own life choices against the imposed existence of an oppressive power, is to not give up and not give in. The parallel with Tunisia’s Mohamed Bouazizi should not be lost here, and it leads to the core of Havel’s point: it is the reverberation of a given act that makes for revolutionary change. Havel’s story of resistance centers around the active observer who sees, internalizes and interprets the act. Exemplary acts can be replicated in a different form, at a different time, with a different audience. They become a springboard for the observer’s own actions. Sarcastically invoking Marx’s opening lines of The Communist Manifesto, Havel called this “the specter of dissent.”

Havel never forgot Palach’s urge to resist demoralization and the temptation to give in. He asked the question powerless people everywhere want answered: How can we prevail over oppression? How can the individual overcome the psychological, social and political barriers imposed by the experience and history of violence? Havel maintained that while individuals might have trouble overcoming such barriers, the difficulty is not insurmountable. The individual can both recognize and overcome her circumstances. Agency from this point of view relies both on the capacity of the individual to recognize her own moral compass and the moral example set by others. Since totalitarian societies destroy the web of human relations among us in order to forestall opposition, we must rebuild our mutual ties, starting with ourselves. Havel’s idea of resistance builds on a view of life as a series of layers, an environment we create together, a work of solidarity continuously in the making. “The salvation of this human world lies nowhere else than in the human heart,” he wrote, “in the human power to reflect, in human meekness and human responsibility.”

Havel’s work stands as a remarkable articulation of what responsible action could look like under the extreme conditions of Eastern European totalitarianism, but the value of his inquiry extends beyond that time and place. Indeed, he expected political ideas to cross boundaries of time and place. Havel the playwright and Havel the dissident intertwine in a philosophical tale of resistance and responsibility that has sparked action the world over. This is the stuff of which revolutions are made. Yet his call to political action also applies to the less extreme but equally important ways in which consumer societies with gross inequalities erode a sense of human connection. His life and work exemplify a kind of interplay between the private individual and the political world, between personal responsibility and social consciousness. Resistance can and must be reawakened within each of us. A year of revolutions has ended with the death of a true revolutionary, but we should rejoice in seeing Havel’s spirit endure in the actions of ordinary people from Cairo, to Russia, to Wall Street.

The V-22 Osprey is one of the most indestructible pieces of military technology ever created.

That is not to say the aircraft, which lands like a helicopter and flies like an airplane, is invulnerable in combat. Like any other combat aircraft, the V-22 could face anti-aircraft fire or otherwise be shot down by enemies. In fact, it might even go down of its own accord, since the V-22 has been unusually prone to accidents. The Osprey has been plagued by safety concerns throughout its development history. During its testing phase between 1991 and 2000, four Osprey crashes resulted in 30 deaths. Since being activated in 2007, one V-22 has been lost in an accident and a number of others have been damaged in smaller incidents.

But the Osprey is indestructible in a different sense. As a piece of political pork and as an enduring paycheck for military contractors, the Osprey seems to be virtually impossible to kill—even at a time when Congressional leaders claim that controlling the federal budget deficit is a top priority, and when even many conservatives have claimed that military cuts should be “on the table.”

Despite being often regularly highlighted as a weapons system that could be cancelled to produce cost savings for the military, the V-22 remains in production. During the debate over the House appropriations bill in late May, Democrats introduced two different amendments that would have cut funding for the Osprey. Rep. Lynn Woolsey (D-CA), who offered one amendment, called the program a “boondoggle” for the military-industrial complex and argued, “The job of the Pentagon is not to make defense contractors rich.”

Yet the House overwhelmingly voted down the amendments after Rep. Patrick Meehan led a campaign to save the V-22. Breaking from typical conservative stances against public spending on employment programs, he wrote in a “dear colleagues” letter:

“Cutting this program will take away high-paying jobs and add to unemployment at a critical time in our economic recovery. Our Congressional priority should be on creating and preserving jobs, not destroying them.”

Over the summer, demands for austerity only heated up. Nevertheless, since the failure of the bipartisan “Super Committee” to reach a budget-cutting deal in November, Republicans have vowed to block the automatic cuts to military spending that are supposed to be triggered for the future. And the defense authorization bill that passed the Senate on December 15 included $2.43 billion for the Osprey.

The V-22′s remarkable longevity is rooted in an ingenious ploy often used to arms contractors to ensure continued funding. Because the manufacture of the Osprey’s components is strategically spread over 2,000 contractors in 40 states, the program has been able to draw on a deep well of political goodwill. A short tour of just a few of its local bases of support would include:

• Ridley, Pennsylvania: A Boeing facility in Ridley is a main site for development of the V-22. In 1991, as prices for the aircraft began to skyrocket and production delays mounted, then-Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney recommended cancelling funding, reportedly calling the Osprey “a turkey.” Yet the program was saved, thanks to Representative Curt Weldon of Delaware County, Pennsylvania, who formed the bipartisan “Tilt-Rotor Technology Coalition” to lobby for the beleaguered aircraft. Overriding the wishes of the Department of Defense itself, the Osprey lived. And Boeing, the largest employer in Delaware County, continued receiving contracts for its development. Today, Patrick Meehan, the leader of the recent fight to defeat the anti-Osprey amendments, serves in Weldon’s district.

• Amarillo, Texas: Bell Textron Inc., a key partner with Boeing, is based in Amarillo, a town known as “Rotor City U.S.A.” owing to its production of V-22s. Like many of his fellow Republicans, Mac Thornberry, the U.S. representative from the area, has railed against the Obama administration’s stimulus efforts, arguingthat “When government bails people out, someone still has to pay the bills,” and, “If Washington wants to help the economy, the best thing it can do is get out of the way.”

  Yet in 2010, after a bipartisan White House commission released a $3.8 trillion deficit reduction plan that targeted the Osprey, Thornberry, who serves on the House Armed Services Committee, was irate. “I appreciate the chairmen of this commission offering some initial proposals to deal with the deficit,” he said in a statement, “but their charge and their expertise does not extend to evaluating individual weapon systems.” He then added, “The V-22 is doing a great job for our military. They need it, and they will have it.” Bell Textron employs more than 1000 peoplein Amarillo.

• Hayden, Idaho: The city of Hayden is home to Unitech Composites and Structures, which has a contract to produce manifolds and ducts for the V-22. The city falls within the district of freshman Congressman Raúl Labrador. As one of an incoming cohort of militantly conservative Republicans identified with the Tea Party, Labrador has made even some veteran members of his own party uneasy with his callto “make drastic, across-the-board cuts to our federal spending levels.”

  Might the Osprey be included in his drastic cuts? The answer appears to be no. In the most recent House debate, Labrador voted against the Woolsey amendment.

While the Osprey is a gift to defense contractors, it has also served as a boon to activists by so nakedly illustrating the wastefulness and cronyism that drives defense budgeting and undermining claims that bloated military budgets actually correspond with national security needs. The annual “Unified Security Budget for the United States”—an alternative defense budget prepared by a coalition of groups including the Institute for Policy Studies, the Center for American Progress, and the Cato Institute—has regularly placed the Osprey alongside systems like the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter as a poster child of needless spending. The 2011 edition of the report notes, “Halting production of the V-22 will save… over $10 billion during the next five years, and would still leave the Marines with more than 150 of the V-22 hybrids.” Similarly, the non-partisan group Citizens Against Government Waste targeted the Osprey program as their “Spending Cut of the Week” in April.

Although the V-22 has become notorious in many respects, it is hardly unique as an example of how military contractors have cleverly manipulated U.S. politics. Since the passage of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) last week, Occupy-related actions in Washington, D.C. and Des Moines, Iowa protesting the measure have produced arrests. Activists have focused primarily on the NDAA’s extension of presidential authority to indefinitely detain individuals as part of the “War on Terror;” however, groups such as United for Peace and Justice also highlight how the bill “wastes billions of dollars that 99% of Americans need for a more secure life here at home.” The phoenix-like Osprey is but one resilient emblem of this waste.