Protesters against Guantanamo in Washington, D.C., on January 11, 2008. Photo by Keith Ivey, via Flickr.

In a world full of injustice—from battered women to clubbed seals to the Club of Europe, from neglected children to nuclear weapons to mountain top removal, from torture at Guantanamo to torture at Bagram to torture in Chicago’s prisons to the torture of the death penalty, from famine in Somalia to deforestation to families being broken by Arizona’s immigration laws—how do you choose what to work on?

Most people choose what affects them most personally, what they feel like they can change, what breaks their heart. Some people choose what seems most strategic: if this small thing changes here, it might move all these other things along in the right direction. Some people race from topic to topic to topic, needing to be everywhere and in the middle of everything. Some combo of the first and second stance seems like the right place to be, right?

I start with all this because I have been thinking about Guantanamo. The notorious and often forgotten gulag is in the news again this week because the Senate voted on Tuesday to retain a provision within the National Defense Authorization Act that would allow the military detain terror suspects on U.S. soil and hold them indefinitely without trial. In addition, the measure—which passed in a bipartisan show of fear-mongering and brutality—would close the door to civilian trials for terror suspects and place restrictions on resettling the dozens of men at Guantanamo who have been cleared for release.

“Congress is essentially authorizing the indefinite imprisonment of American citizens, without charge. We are not a nation that locks up its citizens without charge,” said Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) as her fellow Democrats voted down Mark Udall’s (D-CO) amendment that would have killed the measure.

Wouldn’t it be nice if Feinstein’s words were true? But we don’t have to look as far at Guantanamo or Bagram to see people being locked up without charge. In fact, one of the tactics of the police’s response to Occupys around the country has been arresting people and then releasing them without charge—locking people up just to get them out of the way.

Back to Guantanamo. I have been working hard on this issue for six years. At just about this time in 2005, I was getting ready to fly to Cuba with 24 friends. We planned to walk to Guantanamo—right onto the U.S. naval base and visit the prisoners, spend time with the guards, and bring letters from the men out so that we could send them to their families. We got as close as the Cuban military zone that surrounds the base and there we fasted and prayed and maintained a 24 hour vigil for five days. We held a press conference and international journalists from many outlets based in Havana came to speak with us. We called U.S. Southern Command and the base constantly, alerting them to our presence and requesting permission to enter the base. We hoped that somehow—between our persistent prayer and our constant contact with authorities—the men imprisoned there would find out we were there and why. And they did. We don’t know how, but a month or so later, through a lawyer for a group of detainees, we received a message of gratitude and hope.

A lot has changed in those six years. Back then, there were more than 700 men at Guantanamo. George W. Bush was in the White House. Most Americans didn’t know much about the issue.

Today, there are 171 men who remain at Guantanamo, more than 60 of whom have been cleared for release but remain in detention because of White House cowardice, political horse-trading and Congressional intransigence. President Barack Obama, who campaigned on a promise to close Guantanamo, has replaced Bush in the Oval Office but not shuttered his terrible extra-legal creation. There are dozens of award-winning documentaries, countess important and informative books and thousands of column inches of news coverage of the prison, and even Harold and Kumar got in (and out) of Guantanamo.

But a lot hasn’t changed. Not for Shaker Aamer and the 170 others who are still at Guantanamo. But, we are still at it. Still trying. Why? Because we have been changed, maybe. Because the times demand our action and our effort. Why do I still care? Why am I still passionate about this issue after six years? Because in the name of justice for men at Guantanamo I have been pushed to do things I would have thought laughable and terrifying. To walk far and sleep on the ground, to go without food for days at a time, to court a big fine and possible jail time by flying to Cuba, to speak before thousands of people, to get arrested at the Federal Court, the Supreme Court, the Capitol, the White House, to stay up late and get up early and walk around in a decidedly unflattering orange jumpsuit in the January snow and July humidity. Because I have found an amazing community of people to work and struggle and weep and laugh with. Because no one is free when others are oppressed and shutting eyes and ears and hearts is not an option.

Right after New Year’s, Witness Against Torture is going to Washington again. I’ll be there. We begin our “Hunger for Justice” fast on January 2 and will fill the courtroom at Moultrie Superior Court the next day to support 14 friends who were arrested interrupting the House of Representatives with the call “shut down Guantanamo” in July. We’ll fast through January 11, which will mark 10 long years of detention and torture and lawlessness for so many. We’ll stand with Amnesty and Pax Christi and so many other groups in a human chain that will stretch from the White House to the Capital. We hope to have 2,771 people stand on that day, one for each of the men detained at Guantanamo and Bagram. The Center for Constitutional Rights will hold a press briefing and the National Religious Campaign Against Torture will host an interfaith service. There will be activities throughout the city to draw attention to this shameful anniversary. And then we will break the fast on January 12th.

To be honest, I would rather not go. I will be cold and uncomfortable and hungry. I will miss my husband and our little girl. But there are men at Guantanamo who paint amazing pictures of a life they can hardly imagine anymore. There are men who write poetry and who pray to God for justice, for release and for people like me not to forget them. So I won’t. That is my passion right now. Not forgetting, not getting comfortable with the suffering of others.

Crowd estimates from organizers for the Sunday morning “presente” memorial vigil were around 5,000—much lower than years past, where attendance once peaked at 20,000. The Columbus Police Department reported 3,007 people. But that does not mean the movement to close the SOA and resist militarism is waning. “We can’t get caught in the numbers game,” said SOA Watch field organizer Nico Udu-gama. “This is an anti-imperialist struggle that has ebbed and flowed over the years and is part of the movement that is waking up around the world.” SOA Watch has changed over the years but a few things have remained consistent in one form or another: direct action, solidarity across the Americas, and a view towards the long haul.

Since 1990, when the convergence began, thousands have crossed the line—risking trespass charges on the military base and federal prison time—as an act of conscience and to put the SOA on trial in federal court. Over 300 people have been sentenced to over a collective hundred years in prison. This year, one person, Theresa Cusimano, 43, climbed over the barbed-wire fence on a make-shift ladder. She faces up to six months in prison, if convicted. SOA Watch is planning direct action training in April 2012 in Washington and hopes to capture some of the budding energy in the Occupy movement to break the culture of militarization we are in. It is also drumming up attention for HR 3368—which would cut the school’s funding and free millions of taxpayer dollars that fund it.

The SOA rally—often criticized as a catch-all gathering for justice issues and being a place for “tourist activism”—is entering a new phase where its analysis and incorporation of the interconnectedness of global injustices makes for a diverse and exciting cross-country struggle. SOA Watch has field offices throughout the Americas and has played a leading role in organizing “encuentros” for social activists and anti-militarism resisters to build relationships of solidarity and share best practices and organizing skills. Struggling against racism within the movement, more and more of the speakers, workshop presenters and leadership are people of color while white allies continue to explore the roots of oppression and domination not just at a structural level—such as is modeled by the SOA rally—but in individual relationships as well. A new film from SOA Watch, Somos Una América, documents the incredible movement that exists outside of one protest weekend in November in Georgia.

Because SOA Watch sees itself as an anti-imperialist struggle, it’s in it for the long haul. “This movement is about more than just closing the School of the Americas,” said former prisoner of conscience Friar Louie Vitale, OFM. “It’s about saying no to torture, no to empire.” Critics of the movement—and supporters like the Ignatian Solidarity Network who moved their teach-in to Washington D.C. in 2010—suggest that the continued presence in Georgia is not the most effective place for putting pressure on the politicians with the power to close the SOA (which was, incidentally, renamed the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation in 2002).

While some truth resides in that perspective and SOA Watch has increased its presence in Washington, such critique misses some key points. The annual gathering in Georgia is an energizing and healing weekend for many activists. It is a time to connect and build community; to mourn and remember the thousands who’ve been killed by the state-sponsored terrorism across the Americas; and to celebrate those who resist it—including ourselves. The rally and vigil are a source of sustenance for the thousands of activists who work diligently around the world the rest of the year and the SOA Watch gathering helps keep them going. It also continues to attract new folks, especially young people. With hundreds participating in the student/youth caucus and working groups, a new generation is radicalized into the anti-imperialist struggle.

“We are in a politicizing moment” said Udu-gama referring to the global Occupy Movement. Representatives from occupations across the region came for the weekend to “Occupy Ft. Benning.” The Columbus Ledger-Enquirer speculated that numbers were down in part because of Occupy. But that is a good thing because it means people are acting locally, noted Udu-gama. The energy and rhetoric of the Occupy movement was present during the weekend on signs and banners and in speeches and songs. “The School of the Americas protects the 1 percent. It is the military muscle backing unpopular economic policy [like the neoliberal Free Trade Agreement of the Americas] and the connection between economics and militarism is key for the continuation of imperialism,” said Udu-gama.

Looking forward, the School of the Americas Watch movement is popularizing resistance to the deeply-rooted militarism in the Americas and worldwide. As citizens around the world are rising up against anti-democratic forces that put economic and military interests of the few above the lives, rights, and dignity of the many, grassroots organizations like SOA Watch—that are simultaneously broad-based and issue-focused—are increasingly more relevant for educators, organizers, and activists in the struggle for justice, peace, and democracy.

I was uninjured. I had an apartment in Windsor Terrace that I was walking towards, but that sense of uncertainty—what will the future hold? What will change? When will I go back to work?—loomed large.

In the days that followed, I saw the best of America in New York City—my home. Real mourning, deep soul-searching, amazing altruism and self-sacrifice, and vigorous but respectful debate about why this tragedy happened.

“Our grief is not a cry for war.” That was the slogan that emerged in those days and it reverberated through my city—a truly international metropolis. The citizens of more than 80 nations were killed when the towers fell. Undocumented immigrants, homeless people, white shoe lawyers, seven figure corporate executives, emergency responders all died.

This was not an act of war against the United States, this was a crime against humanity and it should be dealt with thusly. These assertions—borne out of our collective experience of tragedy—were felt as deeply as the ash from the “pile” that burrowed into our pores and clogged our lungs and contaminated every surface of our homes and offices. These assertions were informed by a new group that coalesced in those early days after September 11, 2001 called September Eleventh Families for Peaceful Tomorrows. Men and women who lost loved ones in the Trade Towers, the Pentagon, and the airplanes on that day, men and women who rejected the Bush administration’s thundering drumbeat of war and vengeance. They were inspired by Doctor Martin Luther King’s observation that “wars are poor chisels for carving peaceful tomorrows.”

And there has been little hope of a peaceful tomorrow in the ten years that followed George W. Bush’s declaration of war and the bombardment that began on October 7, 2001.

After 9/11, I threw myself into the peace movement with new vigor. If Rita Lasar and David Potorti and Colleen Kelly and Amber Amundson—members of Peaceful Tomorrows who lost close members of their families on 9/11—could turn their grief into peace-making and reconciliation, then I—who lost no one—could too.

Each anniversary that has followed, I have made a point of walking home from work, walking across the Manhattan Bridge and recalling the fear and anxiety and uncertainty that I felt that day. Reminding myself of the nearly 3,000 people who died—most of whom died in my city, recalling as many of their names as I could… Bill Kelly, Jim Potorti, Abe Zelmanowitz, Craig Amundson; reminding myself too of all those who have died (and continue to die) in Afghanistan and then in Iraq, Pakistan, Yemen, Guantanamo and elsewhere as the war on terror metastasized into a global war.

Each anniversary I have been part of peace vigils, civil disobedience actions, candlelight vigils. One year we did a 24 hour vigil in Washington Square Park and the next morning did a die-in in Union Square. Another year we held a reading of the names of 9/11 victims and Afghan war victims in front of the military recruiters office in Times Square. I wrote essays and analysis and reflections about 9/11 and beyond.

This year is different. This will be the first year I will not walk across the Manhattan Bridge, the first year I will not work in Manhattan and live in Brooklyn. I moved to New London, Connecticut last November and I will not rally or demonstrate or vigil this year. I will not attend any of the countless 9/11 Tributes and Memorials and Conferences and Art Shows and Demonstrations planned for this weekend.

Instead, I will make a pie.

It sounds funny, I know. After almost a decade of activism on this specific date, I will mix flour and butter and salt and roll out dough. I will pick pears from my community garden plot a few blocks away. I’ll peel and core them. After I cut them up and mix them with cinnamon, nutmeg (we are the nutmeg state), brown sugar, lemon juice and black pepper (my own secret—oops—ingredient), I’ll assemble fruit and dough into a pie and let it bake.

As I do all of this, I’ll consider the “Pies for Peace” meditation written by Reverend Carolyn Patierno of All Souls Unitarian Universalist Congregation, where my husband and I go for services (not as often as we’d like).

From the garden, to the kitchen, through our hands, to the table …

May we hold close the ways that we are connected to the land and to all sentient beings.

The feast we make with the pies we bake,

May they nourish what is bitter with what is sweet.

Let there be love.  Let there be plenty.  Let there be peace.

And let it begin with us.

Shalom.  Amen.  Blessed be.

Reverend Carolyn came up with Pies for Peace, to “remind us that however humble our effort we are all responsible for building a new world,” and asks “What better day to recommit ourselves than September 11, 2011?” I will also think of my friend Diana, now living in Los Angeles and celebrating her 40th birthday this weekend. I hope she eats oysters.

This is all so much more modest than lying down in the street or vigiling while standing upright. But, it feels right for me as I mark my first September 11 as a non-New Yorker. “Let there be love. Let there be plenty. Let there be peace” and let it begin with me.

• Hundreds of foreign exchange students walked off their jobs at a Hershey’s chocolate plant in Pennsylvania to protest low pay and physically draining work.

• Latino activists held a protest outside President Barack Obama’s 2012 campaign headquarters on Tuesday to ask him to end a criminal deportation program they say is snaring large number of illegal immigrants who have not committed crimes.

• Syrian security forces fired at thousands of protesters who poured into the streets throughout the country Friday killing at least two, activists said, a day after the United States and its European allies demanded that President Bashar Assad step down.

• Indian activist Anna Hazare began a public hunger strike in the country’s capital Friday, accompanied by thousands of cheering supporters, who want to see stronger anti-corruption measures in India.

• Hundreds of striking Verizon workers held a candlelight vigil outside their CEO’s Mendham, New Jersey mansion Thursday, hoping to draw a stark contrast between the contract demands of blue-collar workers and the quality of life enjoyed by the company’s executives.

• What began as the latest public hearing organized by a U.S. Department of Homeland Security task force to address deportation policy concerns ended in the arrest of 10 immigration reform activists Wednesday evening in Chicago.

• Protesters gatecrashed a mining and exploration conference organised by the New South Wales government in Australia yesterday, abseiling off the balcony of a Sydney hotel to unfurl a banner against coal seam gas.

The still-smouldering Carpetright store in Tottenham. (Photo: Guardian)

Rioting and rampages spreading across English cities have caused severe property destruction and raised public alarm. Writing in London’s Guardian, community organizer Stafford Scott describes how he was among the group that on August 6th sought information from the police in Tottenham, a poorer section of London. They wanted an official statement on whether Mark Duggan had been killed by police bullets, as had been reported in the news.

All we really wanted was an explanation of what was going on. We needed to hear directly from the police. We waited for hours outside the station for a senior officer to speak with the family, in a demonstration led by young women. A woman-only delegation went into the station, as we wanted to ensure that this did not become confrontational. It was when the young women, many with children, decided to call it a day that the atmosphere changed, and guys in the crowd started to voice and then act out their frustrations.

This event is what most media accounts have identified as the spark that set England on fire, which has caught the world by surprise. Yet, says Scott, “If the rioting was a surprise, people weren’t looking.”

My summer in Britain has been jarred by the outbreaks of turmoil and destruction spreading from London to Birmingham, Manchester, and Liverpool. A storm of criticism against the police followed—thunderously amplified by politicians, even while they denounced it as criminality. Surely, the real meaning of these events will take time to discern.

There’s a kernel in Scott’s account that should not be overlooked. Assuming that his report is accurate and faithful, it is possible that an appropriate response to the women-led demonstration in front of a police station might have altered the turn of events. At the most basic level, police and security services need to be able to recognize such a peaceful, nonviolent initiative. No matter the depth of the underlying causative problems in the upheaval, in the background is a difficult fact: police are often not trained in differentiating one nonviolent method from another. Although police services are increasingly trained in mediation, crowd control, and how to handle criminals nonviolently, here they allowed a demonstration to turn into a riot.

Philip B. Heymann’s 1992 analysis of South Africa’s long struggle against apartheid suggests that success in nonviolent action happens through a three-way relationship among the nonviolent challengers, the target group, and the military, police, or security services. If at all possible, Heymann concludes, the challengers should clarify their grievances, purposes, and demands, so as to minimize obstruction or interruption by the other two. This means probing not only the complaint of the nonviolent protagonists, but also examining the objectives and actions of the adversary and police.

In this case there may not have been an immediately evident and concrete target group, but Heymann’s insight is instructive: bring the police into the picture and treat them as part of a relationship. This may be hard advice for some people to swallow. Even so, in analyzing the riots in England, observers must ask whether the police understood that they, too, must be part of a relationship.

We must also acknowledge, however, that there is only so much that police services can do. A failure for decades to address larger social and economic problems make this sort of conflict almost inevitable. A number of distinguished researchers have clearly shown what underlies such a catastrophe. The findings of  Sir Michael Marmot and Richard G. Wilkinson contribute a powerful larger frame for considering the turmoil of the English cities. Clinical data in Marmot and Wilkinson’s Social Determinants of Health (2001) concerning well-being for modern societies, supports their contention that social pathologies (crime, high levels of imprisonment, mental illness, and poor health status) are more common in societies with steep maldistribution of wealth than where economic distribution has resulted in lesser gaps between rich and the poorest. Wilkinson and Kate Pickett explain in The Spirit Level: Why Equality is Better for Everyone (2009) that income inequality correlates with thirteen health and social problems, such as unemployment and drug use. The World Health Organization’s Commission on Social Determinants of Health urges countries to “tackle the inequitable distribution of power, money, and resources.” Britain, along with the United States, are known to have the lowest rates of social mobility among the industrialized countries.

Whatever the subsequent, numerous lessons to be drawn from the wreckage in the English cities, it would be prudent to recognize that police (and diplomats and journalists) need formal training in understanding civil citizen action, and how to respond to it as part of a relationship. That alone, however, will not be enough, unless governments and the public address the underlying social and economic factors.

In a Paris metro station, United4Iran and Move4Iran organized a silent flash mob (video above) on June 9, to commemorate the second anniversary of the elections in Iran and raise awareness about the continuing human rights abuses in the country.

And in New York, Where Is My Vote – NY held a candlelight vigil (video below) at Union Square to show solidarity for those in Iran who are continuing the struggle for self-determination.

• On Friday, nearly 100,000 Yemenis protested in a main square of the capital, demanding the president’s ouster in the biggest rally since Ali Abdullah Saleh left for Saudi Arabia after he was wounded in an attack on his palace.

• Thousands of Shiite Bahrainis rallied Saturday answering a call from their largest opposition group, Al-Wefaq, in the first demonstration since a mid-march crackdown on Shiite-led pro-democracy protests.

• Thousands of Syrians demonstrated all over the country on Friday, especially in smaller cities and rural towns. Some 7000 came out in downtown Homs. Troops fired on crowds and responded with brutality against protesters.

• On Sunday, Pakistan Tehrik-e-Insaf (PTI) staged a sit-in in Quetta to protest against the safe passage allowed to NATO supplies through Pakistan.

• On Sunday, at least 15,000 Greeks protested in front of parliament over the government’s economic policies and called for mass participation in a general strike this week.

• In Peru, Aymara activists announced on Friday that they will resume their strike civil strike indefinitely, and thousands immediately joined roadblocks on the main highway to Bolivia near the border town of Desaguadero.

• On Friday, thousands of college students and supporting citizens continued a protest, which has brought people to the streets every night over the last month, demanding South Korean President Lee Myung-bak fulfil his presidential election pledge to cut tuition fees by half, and provide solutions for youth unemployment.

• About 20 pro-independence demonstrators have kept an all-night vigil at a colonial fort in Puerto Rico to protest during President Barack Obama’s visit to the island.

• Some 500 Indian inmates ended a two-day hunger strike at the CRS No. 5 prison in the southern Mexican state of Chiapas after officials granted their demand for better conditions.

• On Monday, 21 activists were arrested after hundreds occupied the Department of Interior’s headquarters in Washington D.C. to call for the abolition of offshore oil drilling, coal mining and tar sands extraction.

• On Monday, Tax Day protests were held in some 300 cities. Many protesters focused their attention on Bank of America, Wells Fargo and Google for avoiding to pay their full share of taxes by using tax code loopholes.

• The Syrian government has passed a draft law to end emergency rule after 48 years, but protests are continuing across Syria. On Monday, more than 5,000 anti-government protesters in Syria took over the main square of the country’s third-largest city, Homs, vowing to occupy the site until President Bashar Assad is ousted.

• In Yemen today, gunmen on motorcycles sped by and opened fire on hundreds of demonstrators camped out in the early hours in the Red Sea port city of Hodeida, killing one and wounding several.

• In India, police opened fire on hundreds of protesters Monday at a demonstration against the construction of a new six-reactor nuclear power station. One protester was killed, and more than 20 people were arrested.

• Vigils were held in the Occupied Territories over the weekend for the slain peace activist Vittorio Arrigoni, who was killed last week after his capture by extremist Palestinian militants.

• Trade unions at the Polish coal company Jastrzebska Spolka Weglowa (JSW) in southern Poland launched a one-day strike on Monday morning and threatened to block the transport of coal from the mines to protest government privatization plans.

Last evening, they showed us photos of an unusual walk they’d held in the streets of downtown Kabul that morning.  Dressed in white, with the young women wearing sky blue veils and the young men in the same color neck scarves, the Afghan Youth Peace Volunteers carried sky blue and white banners proclaiming that Peace is a Pre-Requisite for Progress. They are seeking an end to wars in their country.  “Why did you choose sky blue?” I asked.  “Because it shows that there is just one sky over all of us,” Chahara replied. Although they came from different ethnicities and various provinces, they walked shoulder to shoulder, 40 of them, on a bright, warm day.

The delegation’s itinerary over the next few days is jam-packed. Kelly writes that:

On March 19^th, in Kabul, Afghan Youth Peace Volunteers will hold a candlelight commemoration, remembering the children recently killed in Afghanistan.  Following  this ceremony they will plant saplings as a symbol of their dedication to a nonviolent future. Their compassion extends beyond Afghanistan to young people in other lands, some of whom they will connect with through a “Global Day of Listening,”  a 24 hour Skype communication which they’ll host on the first day of spring [March 20], Afghanistan’s “Nau Roz” (New Year’s Day) holiday…  (see:  www.livewithoutwars.org and www.ourjourneytosmile.com or email globaldayoflistening@gmail.com to arrange participation for yourself and/or your community.

Hopefully over the next few days we will be running the dispatches from our contributors on the ground, so check back for updates on the work of these courageous activists.

• About 100 animal rights advocates gathered at a bear check station in New Jersey on Saturday to protest the last day of the state’s first bear hunt in five years, which killed nearly 600 bears.

• Hundreds of people gathered in Moscow on Sunday to call for the resignation of Prime Minister Vladimir Putin.

• A group of about thirty people came out to the City of Vancouver’s first candlelight vigil on violence against women, which was held on Friday to coincide with International Human Rights day and the end of 16 Days of Activism on Gender Violence.

• In a protest apparently assembled largely through a network of banned cellphones, inmates across at least six prisons in Georgia have been on strike since Thursday, calling for better conditions and compensation.

• Hundreds of environmentalists in the Philippines completed a four-day 150-kilometer march-caravan rally on Friday to protest areas where large-scale mines will operate.

• Tens of thousands of union members, social activists and students gathered in Seoul Sunday to protest the Group of 20 economic summit meeting that begins on Thursday.

• Tens of thousands of government employees marched in Portugal’s capital on Saturday to protest an austerity budget that would slash their salaries.

• Thousands of protesters in France and Germany have attempted to block a train carrying nuclear waste. Some protesters chained themselves to the train tracks while others drove trucks on to the tracks. Hundreds of protesters have been detained.

• On Sunday, Cafe de Coral, Hong Kong’s biggest fast-food chain, said it had ditched plans to scrap paid lunch breaks for its employees after a public and Facebook campaign was mounted boycotting its restaurants.

• Hundreds of gay and lesbians protested the Church’s position on gay marriage by kissing publicly as the pope passed by on his way to the  Sagrada Familia in Barcelona on Sunday.

• In Oakland, police arrested 152 protesters who streamed through the streets Friday after a white ex-transit officer received the minimum two-year prison sentence for fatally shooting an unarmed black man on a California train platform two years ago.

• A group of 400 survivors of the Bhopal disaster have been protesting Obama’s visit to India. In addition, the cotton growers of Vidarbha, who are suffering immensely due to the prevailing agrarian crisis, staged candlelight protests ahead of US President Barack Obama’s India visit on Friday.

• On Monday, activists with the Rainforest Action Network dumped 1,000 pounds of earth and rubble brought from Appalachia on to the EPA headquarters’  lawn to compel the agency to veto the 2,278-acre Spruce mountaintop mine project in Blair, W.Va. The message: “EPA: don’t let King Coal dump on Appalachia.”

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.

Libby, at the wheel, is telling Jerica about her visit to Kabul, in 1970. “I worked for Pan Am,” said Libby, “and that meant being able to stay for free at the Intercontinental Hotel in Kabul. After landing in Pakistan, we hired a driver to take us across the Khyber Pass into Afghanistan. All along the highway we saw herds of camel traveling along a parallel old road. I wonder if the camel market in Kabul is still there?”

Jerica says she’ll look for it. She and I have been hard at work to obtain visas and arrange flights for an October trip to Pakistan and Afghanistan. [Libby is exceptional in that she hasn't tried to talk Jerica out of the dangerous travel.]

Conversation switches to whatever CD has just come on, and I tune out, wondering if I’ve done my share of issuing warnings to Jerica about traveling in a war zone.

Tinny music and rural Texan countryside blend together.

My thoughts drift to the Emergency Surgical Center for Victims of War, in Kabul. A little over two months ago, Josh and I met Nur Said, age 11, in the hospital’s ward for young boys injured by various explosions. Most of the boys welcomed a diversion from the ward’s tedium, and they were especially eager to sit outside, in the hospital garden, where they’d form a circle and talk together for hours. Nur Said stayed indoors. Too miserable to talk, he’d merely nod at us, his hazel eyes welling up with tears. Weeks earlier, he had been part of a hardy band of youngsters that helped bolster their family incomes by searching for scrap metal and unearthing land mines on a mountainside in Afghanistan. Finding an unexploded land mine was a eureka for the children because, once opened, the valuable brass parts could be extracted and sold. Nur had a land mine in hand when it suddenly exploded, ripping four fingers off his right hand and blinding him in his left eye.

On a sad continuum of misfortune, Nur and his companions fared better than another group of youngsters scavenging for scrap metal in the Kunar Province on August 26th.

Following an alleged Taliban attack on a nearby police station, NATO forces flew overhead to “engage” the militants. If the engagement includes bombing the area under scrutiny, it would be more apt to say that NATO aimed to puree the militants. But in this case, the bombers mistook the children for militants and killed six of them, aged 6 to 12. Local police said there were no Taliban at the site during the attack, only children.

General Petraeus assures his superiors that the U.S. is effectively using drone surveillance, sensors and other robotic means of gaining intelligence to assure that they are hunting down the right targets for assassination. But survivors of these attacks insist that civilians are at risk. In Afghanistan, thirty high schools have shut down because the parents say that their children are distracted by the drones flying overhead and that it’s unsafe for them to gather in the schools.

I think of Nur, trapped in his misery, at the Emergency surgical center. He’ll be one among many thousands of amputees whose lives are forever altered by the war and poverty that afflict his country. Many of these survivors are likely to feel intense hatred toward their persecutors. 300 villagers in the Sayed Abad district of Wardak province took to the streets in protest on August 12, following an alleged U.S. night raid. “They murdered three students and detained five others,” one of the protesters said. “All of them were civilians.” Villagers, shocked by the killing, shouted that they didn’t want Americans in Afghanistan. According to village eyewitnesses, American troops stormed into a family home and shot three brothers, all young men, and then took their father into custody. One of the young men was a student who had returned to the family home to celebrate the traditional “iftar” fast at the beginning of Ramadan. Local policemen are investigating the allegations, and NATO recently conceded that they may have killed some civilians. (see www.vcnv.org Afghanistan Atrocities update).

The drones feed hourly intelligence information to U.S. war commanders, but the machinery can’t inform people about the spiraling anger as the U.S. conducts assassination operations in countries throughout the 1.3 billion-strong Muslim world. “Sold as defending Americans,” writes Fred Branfman, “(it) is actually endangering us all. Those responsible for it, primarily General Petraeus, are recklessly seeking short-term tactical advantage while making an enormous long-term strategic error that could lead to countless American deaths in the years and decades to come.”

The Prius is comfortable, but my side of the backseat has become a makeshift office. The most important file contains Bill Quigley’s comprehensive argumentation as to why the court should allow us to present a necessity defense based on international law. Bill is the Legal Director for the Center for Constitutional Rights. On September 14, we want to call on him as an expert witness. We and our codefendants have chosen to mount a pro se defense to try to persuade our judge that far from committing a crime we have exercised our rights and our duties, under international and U.S. law, to try to prevent one and to raise public opposition to usage of drones in “targeted” assassinations.

Jerica hands me the questions we can use to elicit Bill’s testimony. We try to word our questions so that the evidence will be admissible in court. “Could Bill please inform the court about citizen’s responsibilities under international law, could he explain to the court what articles and statutes we will be invoking?” To a layperson, it seems like an elaborate game of “Mother May-I,” and we haven’t even started developing questions to ask Col. Ann Wright, the former U.S. diplomat, who had helped re-open the U.S. Embassy in Kabul shortly before resigning her job in a refusal to cooperate with buildup toward the May 2003 U.S. Shock and Awe invasion of Iraq.

Rounding out our trio of expert witnesses is former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark. We hope his personal experience within the U.S. government might arouse the court’s more careful attention to the seldom-discussed legal issues that are fundamentally at stake here. However, the judge has already indicated that his calendar only allots one day for our trial.

Libby, Jerica, Mary and I have blocked out at least ten days, inclusive of travel, for our small contribution to an ongoing effort of people around the world working to put drones on trial. We’re in New Mexico now. I feel cramped and restless, and I wonder if Tucumcari, where we plan to stop for lunch, has internet. We can’t possibly bring the testimony of Afghans and Pakistanis to court this Tuesday. Their testimony, borne on bodies scarred and mutilated and harbored in memories of nightmare, will never be given away and cannot be given in court. Extrajudicial killings are killings without rule of law, without trial. Few if any Afghan or Pakistani civilian survivors of U.S. wars will ever travel to a U.S. court of law for consideration of their grievances.

And at this moment I realize that if we were four Afghans or Pakistanis or Iraqis traveling in a war zone, we’d have spent this entire trip watching not the Southwestern landscape, but the skies.

• Through a series of well-choreographed steps, a tiger-themed flash mob called “Freeze Tiger Trade” spearheaded by WWF-Malaysia turned heads and attracted attention on the status of our Malayan tigers here in Kuala Lumpur.

• In Turkey, nongovernmental organizations in the eastern province of Batman held a silent march and sit-in demonstration yesterday in protest of a mine explosion that claimed the lives of four people on Monday.

• On Wednesday, unionized workers of the West Indies Paper Products Limited in Jamaica walked off the job to protest against what they claimed was the failure of the management to improve wage and fringe benefits.

• More than 100 people at Yarl’s Wood Immigration Removal Centre in England went on hunger strike on Wednesday.

• In Azerbaijan, ten opposition activists jailed for participating in an unsanctioned rally calling for free elections in central Baku on July 31 have declared a hunger strike.

• Around 120 Chinese seasonal berry pickers in northern Sweden went on a 15-kilometre (9.3-mile) march overnight to Friday to protest their salaries

• In Malaysia, police forcefully broke up peaceful candlelight vigils held on August 1, against the Internal Security Act (ISA), and arrested 36 people in Petaling Jaya and Penang.

• Anti-BP protesters from Greenpeace disrupted a speech by the company’s chief of staff at a major oil conference in London yesterday, urging the company to change its ways following the Deepwater Horizon disaster.

• Members of an indefinite vigil held in front of the Massachusetts State House have reached their 17th day of protest against the anti-immigrant amendments added to the budget bill.

• More than 100 gay rights protesters marched in Toronto on Saturday to demand greater rights for all minority populations marginalized because of their gender, sexuality or socioeconomic status.

• Students and staff at 100 colleges and universities in Great Britain are protesting funding cuts that could keep 200,000 people out of universities next year.

• Students at the University of Puerto Rico voted to end their two-month strike against massive budget cuts on Monday after agreeing to a package with the administration that includes an extension of tuition waivers, the cancellation of a fee that would have drastically raised education costs, a commitment not to arbitrarily punish strike participants, and rejection of school privatization plans.

• Israeli soldiers injured several protesters on Sunday in an attack on a nonviolent demonstration against illegal settlements and the construction of the Israeli separation wall in the Palestinian village of Beit Jala, near Bethlehem.

• 12,000 Minnesota nurses voted to hold an open-ended strike on Monday following retaliation from employers after a one-day strike on June 10.