• On Saturday, more than 100,000 turned out in the pale winter sunshine for a march in downtown Moscow against election fraud and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin’s plan to return to the presidency next month.

• Over 10,000 Bahrainis gathered on Sunday to begin a week-long sit-in protest in Meqsha, north of Bahrain, ahead of the one year anniversary of the revolution.

• Hundreds of flights in France were cancelled today, including 40 percent out of Paris’ Charles de Gaulle Airport, as unions ratcheted up pressure on day two of a strike over labor rights.

• Antiwar groups held rallies on Saturday in about 80 cities across the United States protesting a possible strike on Iran.

• In Singapore, two hundred foreign workers staged a sit-in on Monday morning in protest over unpaid wages.

• At least one activist died, and another 39 were injured on Sunday after police tried to break up a protest by indigenous groups—who have blockaded the Pan-American Highway for days—against the recent approval of mines and reservoirs in their region.

• In Canada, close to a thousand people marched through Prince Rupert’s streets on Saturday as part of a rally hosted by local first nations against Enbridge’s proposed Northern Gateway pipeline and the oil tanker traffic it would generate on British Columbia’s northern coast.

• At least 11 Occupy D.C. protesters were arrested Saturday just blocks from the White House as the U.S. Park Police evicted activists who had been sleeping in McPherson Square since October 1. On Sunday, police also cleared a second encampment at Freedom Plaza.

• In one of more than a hundred protests planned across Europe on Saturday, about 2,000 people marched in the Slovenian capital, Ljubljana against the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA).

• Some 20 residents of Khirbat al-Tawil village, south of Nablus in the occupied West Bank, went on a 24-hour hunger strike on Friday to protest against Israel’s occupation of their lands.

A checkpoint run by the Free Syrian Army (FSA) at Baba Amr, a poor district in the southwestern part of Homs. Photo from Der Spiegel.

Say the words, “Free Syrian Army” in nearly any gathering of Syrian expatriates lately, and their faces break into wide smiles of appreciation. Say the same words to people in Syria, and they say, “They will liberate us.” This sentiment is growing all over Syria, as the defected soldiers that make up the FSA wage battle against their pro-regime counterparts. But will such optimism last?

Nearly 11 months into the Syrian uprising, ordinary civilians, once certain of the effectiveness of civil resistance, are losing hope. They turn to the FSA for protection. The world has been in awe of the Syrian revolution and its peaceful activists (“How brave!” “Such tenacity!”), who vow to oust the Assad regime once and for all, and the peaceful protests continue daily. However, many of these demonstrations are protected from Assad’s army and snipers by the FSA, where and when possible. The presence of the FSA at protest sites has re-energized protesters, who are coming out in increasing numbers even as the regime escalates its violence against them.

Given the FSA’s popularity in some communities, many argue that the full-scale militarization of the Syrian conflict is inevitable. But FSA successes in Zabadani, the eastern belt of the Damascus suburbs, and Homs, among other areas, have given Syrians renewed hope. Their hope stems not from the thought that military help is coming from the West or NATO, but that it comes from home-grown forces: brothers and fathers and uncles who could not face the thought of shooting at their own unarmed people, and who defected. As of this writing, FSA soldiers in Zabadani are facing a massive assault by regime forces, and the FSA has vowed to fight back until “we are all free or we are all dead.” Its determination has inspired others to go out and protest despite the fighting.

Is this the end of peaceful resistance in Syria? Does the emergence of the FSA mean that nonviolence is a thing of the past? Apparently not. Protesters now seem emboldened by their protectors, and have engaged in ever more creative forms of peaceful civil disobedience.

Today, the city of Hama commemorated the massacres of 1982, in which Hafez Al-Assad, Bashar Al-Assad’s father, killed as many as 40,000 people in just over a week. (It’s a sad irony that over the past year, more than 1,000 people have been killed in Hama alone by the junior Assad, including more than a dozen today; more than 6,000 more from around the rest of the country have died as a result of the continuing crackdown.) In preparation, the entire city of Hama shut down on Thursday as security forces descended upon the city to thwart any commemorative demonstrations. Much to the surprise of Assad’s security forces, residents observed a general strike throughout the city—but not before painting streets red and throwing dye into the famous water wheels on the Orontes River. Activists spray-painted graffiti on the walls: “Hafez died, and Hama did not. Bashar will die, and Hama will not.”

In Daraa, another flashpoint city (aren’t they all, at this point?), protesters clapped in union and chanted, “He who kills his people is a traitor.”

All over Syria, in virtually every city, town and village, pro-democracy activists distribute leaflets, create new anti-regime songs, draw caricatures and stage plays to voice their opposition to the Assad regime. The nonviolent part of the movement is still very much alive.

Across continents and oceans, Syrian activists in Toronto, London and Vienna are staging flash mobs in public spaces to let the world know what is happening in their homeland. In Manchester, England, nonviolent activists created a video, “The Whole World Supports Syria,” which shows young people from around the world holding up signs of city names, victims’ names or inspirational messages.

In Washington, D.C., Ottawa, Berlin, Cairo and other world capitals, Syrian activists are doing sit-ins at Russian embassies and consulates to protest Russia’s staunch support of Assad in the United Nations Security Council. Detroit, Chicago and LA are holding sing-alongs and fundraisers to buy and deliver medical supplies.

Another form of nonviolent resistance are the Twitter campaigns designed to stretch the Friday protests in Syria into the weekend, worldwide. One of them is directed by the Free Syrian Twitter Army against the “minhibakjis,” the pro-Assadists who like to intimidate and harass Syrian activists around the world. The FSTA focuses on the minhibakjis by sending targeted messages just to irritate and annoy the enemy. The FSTA has simple rules: no profanity, no personal attacks and tag all tweets with #FSTA.

For now, at least, the nonviolent movement remains alive and thriving. Scholars of civil resistance understand full well that short-term gains by the FSA today do not necessarily mean a democratic Syria tomorrow. And while the FSA enjoys popular support in certain cities now, many activists—especially those watching events in Egypt—wonder whether they might be trading one military dictatorship for another. Historically, an armed revolution tends to lessen popular participation; however, thus far in Syria, that hasn’t been the case.

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.

Several weeks ago, a 28-year-old Army vet, who had worked with drones during two tours in Iraq and is now a radical art student in New York, came up with a creative act of protest to raise awareness around the growing use of drones domestically by police forces across the country.

According to an article in last week’s New Yorker, over the course of several nights, the veteran (who remains anonymous) and a few friends posted eleven unusual street signs around New York City, which is apparently investigating using drones as a law enforcement tool.

Designed to look exactly like official street signs, the fake NYPD signs had several different messages: “ATTENTION: Drone Activity in Progress,” or “ATTENTION: Local Statutes Enforced by Drones,” or “ATTENTION: Authorized Drone Strike Zone, 8am-8pm, Including Sunday.”

Near each sign, they also stenciled a quote from a Founding Father, such as a warning from Ben Franklin that seems particularly apropos: “They that can give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.”

As Avaaz pledged to do as part of a recent petition, activists now need to buy or build their own drones and fly them over the city to back up these signs and make the reality of drones just a bit more tangible to an American public that often seems completely disconnected from the issue.

Merton, a Catholic monk best known at the time for his many books of contemplative spirituality, poetry, and compelling autobiographical reflection, had suddenly taken the full measure of the atomic threat in 1961. Between October 1961 and October 1962 he penned a flurry of letters to friends, activists, artists, and intellectuals vigorously and prophetically urging a new way forward. These 111 “Cold War Letters”—supported by numerous essays and poems he also produced at the time on this subject—were part of an effort by Merton to create (as theologian and activist James W. Douglass put it in the foreword to this collection that was finally published in 2006) “a spiritual chain reaction counter to the Bomb.”

With Merton’s birthday approaching (had he lived, he would have turned 97 next Tuesday, January 31), it seems an appropriate time to remember—but also to learn from—this pilgrim for peace and how he “waged nonviolence.”

At the far end of the 1950s, Merton began to reframe his understanding of his identity and vocation as a monk. Casting off an earlier separation from humanity that he had avidly and pietistically embraced when he entered the Abbey of Gethsemani south of Louisville, Kentucky in 1941, he came to see that, not only was he part of the world, he was called to love it. This stance did not mean, though, uncritically accepting the world as it is. Indeed, it meant prophetically challenging systems and patterns of violence and injustice that prevent the fullness of love from flourishing. Part of loving the world included critiquing it.

This took many forms. He wrote a series of books and articles against war, beginning with an essay published in The Catholic Worker newspaper entitled, “The Roots of War.” He wrote widely against racism and in support of the Civil Rights movement. He published a book on Gandhi, and supported and endorsed numerous peace initiatives, including the Catholic Peace Fellowship and the Fellowship of Reconciliation.

He, like many other advocates for peace and justice before and since, was also being tracked by the government. Several years ago I received a copy of files kept on Merton, which had been obtained by a Freedom of Information Act request made by Robert G. Grip, a reporter at a television station in Mobile, Alabama. The collection of documents that was declassified and released is slim but illustrative:

The United States federal agencies queried were the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s (FBI) main headquarters and Louisville office, and the U.S. State Department’s offices of Passport Services and the Central Foreign Policy Records. The request yielded a letter intercepted by the CIA from Merton to [Nobel laureate] Boris Pasternak in 1958 while covertly monitoring letters between the United States and the Soviet Union… The FBI offices revealed information kept on Merton in regards to his involvement with the peace movement (mainly the Catholic Peace Fellowship) and in helping conscientious objector Joseph T. Mulloy.

In support of Mulloy’s application for CO status, Merton wrote a letter dated February 19, 1968 (at the height of the Vietnam War) to Local Draft Board 47 in Louisville, Kentucky, which found its way into the file:

As spiritual advisor, I have been consulted by Joseph Mulloy, who is seeking to follow his conscience in opposition to war. I believe he has every right to do so & also believe that his rights are being denied him. Consequently, doing my simple duty as a priest, I have given him encouragement & support in his fight for his right. I would like to make clear that such support is a religious matter and is not to be construed as an illegal act, nor is it political. It is essential for the preservation of American democratic values that the rights of conscience be respected even, indeed especially, in matters involving violence and war.

This activity probably prompted one of the more intriguing pages in the file. A May 1968 document from the Kentucky State Un-American Activities Committee argues that “a closer look should be taken at the questionable activity within the Roman Catholic Church of Louisville and Kentucky,” based on some “findings” passed along by a group named Catholic Concerned Citizens. Most of the document is blacked out (apparently to protect the privacy of those named), but at the top of the list there is a paragraph on Merton, which concludes “he is of an undesirable element and should be considered the #1 target of your committee.”

Many things likely motivated such vitriol, but, coming just a couple of months after the anti-draft demonstration, it probably is rooted in the conviction that religion and politics don’t mix, especially politics of the progressive variety. But, as Merton indicates in his letter supporting Mulloy, he sees the matter differently. Not so much that religion and politics “mix” as there is a deeper unity they share. This is rooted in one of Merton’s fundamental spiritual tenets, articulated in his prose-poem “Hagia Sophia”:

There is in all visible things an invisible fecundity, a dimmed light, a meek namelessness, a hidden wholeness. This mysterious Unity and Integrity is Wisdom, the Mother of all, Natura naturans. There is in all things an inexhaustible sweetness and purity, a silence that is a fount of action and joy. It rises up in wordless gentleness and flows out to me from the unseen roots of all created being, welcoming me tenderly, saluting me with indescribable humility. This is at once my own being, my own nature, and the Gift of my Creator’s Thought and Art within me, speaking as Hagia Sophia, speaking as my sister, Wisdom.

The profound indivisibility of reality calls us not only to become aware of the sacredness of every being but also to recognize that a step taken to heal the torn or frayed web of life is not primarily a political tactic but a deeply spiritual act.

As the 1960s progressed, Merton functioned as a spiritual advisor not simply to individuals like Joseph Mulloy but to a growing global network and even to peace and justice movements. (Many years ago, a theologian I met in graduate school told me that during the Civil Rights movement, which he actively participated in, he would occasionally take a long drive to Merton’s monastery. For a few hours, Merton would go AWOL and they would drive the back roads of the area and talk strategy and spirituality.)

But this unique form of spiritual direction (most of which we would call “distance learning” today, since he rarely left the monastery) grew out of his 1961 encounter with the horror of war and its preeminent modern symbol: nuclear weapons. He intuited the logic and trajectory of this latest, technologized version of the myth of redemptive violence. Hence he wrote his Cold War Letters, which Douglass called “a form of praying in the darkness, a search for light with the companions he addressed, a night of the spirit when everything seemed lost.” Douglass frames the crisis Merton was wrestling with:

As he wrote these letters…in the year leading up to the Cuban Missile Crisis, Merton saw clearly what was at stake in the Cold war. It was the survival of the human race—survival not only physically, from inconceivably destructive weapons, but also spiritually from the ways in which we made the weapons our gods and obeyed their commands….

In a letter to Archbishop T. D. Roberts in London, he feared the situation “amounts in reality to a moral collapse, in which the policy of the nation is more or less frankly oriented toward a war of extermination…step by step we come closer to it because the country commits itself more and more to policies which, but for a miracle, will make it inevitable.

And, as Douglass sketches in his foreword (and illuminates in stunning detail in his comprehensive book, JFK and the Unspeakable) the miracle briefly came to pass. President Kennedy rejected the Pentagon’s plan to launch nuclear war over Cuba and worked with his enemy, Nikita Khrushchev, to defuse the crisis. (Douglass’s book goes on to copiously document how this peacemaking between enemies continued, often in secret, with regard to Berlin, Indonesia, and the achievement of the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty until Kennedy’s death.)

But Douglass does not leave it there. He draws the parallels between the crisis of the nuclear arms race of the 1960s and the current war on terror. Like Merton, we are faced today with a monumental crisis: endless war with physical and spiritual death and destruction for millions.

With the increasingly reckless saber-rattling concerning Iran of late, the horrific prospect of a new and even more lethal war has every chance of gaining virtually unstoppable momentum. And so we, like Merton, face a choice: More of the same or a “Great Turning”?

As Merton wrote in one of the Cold War Letters to activist Jim Forest: “Really we have to pray for a total and profound change in the mentality of the whole world.” At this late hour, we are each called to this “total and profound change”—which, like Hagia Sophia/Holy Wisdom, discerns the “hidden wholeness” by which we are all connected—and, in turn, called to put this transformation into concrete, visible and profoundly nonviolent action.

Happy birthday, Tom. Thank you for your life and your enduring light.

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.

Now more than ever, each one of us is called to play a role in the local and global movements emerging to grapple with the monumental challenges facing our communities and our societies. This participation will require commitment and courage, but also training, preparation, and rigorous education for nonviolent change.

Fortunately, we have many options.

The great nonviolence mentors and trainers of the U.S. Civil Rights movement—including James Lawson, Bayard Rustin, Glenn Smiley and Ella Baker—founded a tradition of nonviolence training that has proliferated over the past half century. Numerous movements over these decades have utilized systematic training to prepare people for action; to disseminate models for successful movement building; to cultivate community and solidarity; to strengthen the potential for participatory democracy; and to build the infrastructure of nonviolent people power.

While these programs have often been geared to achieving narrowly defined objectives, in many cases they ultimately draw their power from the psychologically seismic process of rocking a mind-set deeply rooted in the ancient paradigm of violence. Nonviolence training, however cursory or lengthy, cracks open the possibility of an alternative to passivity and violence and thus invites us to become innovative “artisans of a new humanity,” as the theologian Juan Luis Segundo puts it.

Today numerous organizations offer rich resources for this training. Here are a few of the many that exist.

Activist training: Training for Change, War Resisters League, Turning the Tide, Nonviolence International, CANVAS, and International Center on Nonviolent Conflict.

Anti-oppression training: Center for Third World Organizing, Crossroads Antiracism Organizing and Training, and People’s Institute for Survival and Beyond – Undoing Racism.

Conflict resolution training: Alternatives to Violence and Peace Circles.

Communication training: Powerful Non-Defensive Communication, Nonviolent Communication, and The Compassionate Listening Project.

There are many university-based training programs now, including the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies at Notre Dame—where John Paul Lederach, a pioneer in conflict transformation and peacebuilding who trains people around the world, teaches—and the Center for Peacemaking at Marquette University, which trains students and teachers in Milwaukee schools. TRANSCEND Online Peace University provides distant learning opportunities.

The Metta Center for Nonviolence offers spiritually grounded training for the engaged nonviolent life, as does the organization I work with, Pace e Bene Nonviolence Service. There are also many great freelance trainers, including long-time activist and author Starhawk.

Thirty years ago this March I experienced my first full-length nonviolence training when I was in graduate school. At the time there was a groundswell of nonviolent action focused on closing or converting Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, a top-secret nuclear weapons lab that had designed 50 percent of the U.S. atomic arsenal. At the time I was working at the Center for Ethics and Social Policy and had started a project studying the economic, political, psychological, physiological and environmental consequences of the arms race with the USSR, which was going full bore at the time. Although I had not started out terribly political, I was becoming increasingly convinced that this weapons build-up had to end. Nevertheless, I did not consider myself an activist and did not seriously see myself doing anything so rash as engaging in civil disobedience. I heard about the Saturday training and decided to check it out, but I definitely did not go with the idea of taking action the following Monday morning.

I found the training organized and clear. A welcoming and safe space was created by the training team, which, I remember to this day, included Pamela Osgood, Darla Rucker, Bruce Turner, Pat Runo, and Terry Messman. There was a logic to the workshop, which included eliciting the group’s knowledge about the history, principles, and dynamics of nonviolence; reflecting on our hopes and fears when considering action; receiving a healthy dose of information about the likely legal process and jail time; and then engaging in a full-on civil disobedience role-play, which we debrief and analyzed in depth.

At one point we broke into small groups to reflect on how nonviolence works. Terry Messman was part of this group and I was deeply impressed with his knowledge but, even more, his passion. He had spent six-months in federal prison for engaging in nonviolent action at the Trident submarine base in Bangor, Washington, and it was clear that this experience, rather than breaking his spirit, had emboldened it. Halfway through the training I surprised myself by deciding to join the others on Monday in blocking the South Gate of the laboratory.

This proved to be my baptism into a conscious path of nonviolence and nonviolent action. Thirty of us netted a week in the county jail, which became a personally transformative experience. Then and there I joined a newly formed Spirit Affinity Group with Terry and several of the others from the training and spent the next couple of years highly engaged in nonviolent resistance. I also started co-leading nonviolence trainings, which, in addition to helping to build a network of advocates prepared for action working for a nuclear-free future (and later, an end to U.S. war in Central America), also deepened my own understanding of the dynamics of nonviolent change. I came to value nonviolence training primarily because it offers participants a chance to reflect on critical issues and on opportunities to make a choice about how to respond to them.

Since then, I have continued to be involved in this particular form of skill building for a more just, peaceful and democratic society. For example, over the past couple of weeks I have facilitated or co-facilitated three nonviolence workshops in Chicago, where I now live. The first was for a church group that has been providing meals to homeless people and now wanted to explore how to tackle the systems that helped create homelessness in the first place. The second was for activists preparing for nonviolent direct action to protest policies of torture on the tenth anniversary of the establishment of the prison at the U.S. Naval Base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. And the third was for a group of students at DePaul University who are training to become presenters on the power of nonviolence in classes and student groups across the university. In each case I noticed enthusiasm building throughout the process, and a palpable sense that we were all discovering tools and a sense of connection and possibility that would strengthen our capacity to make a difference.

A plethora of nonviolence training models and organizations are available for our growth and maturity as agents of nonviolent change. The tradition that James Lawson and others jump-started is alive and well. Together we can take advantage of these rich resources to be increasingly ready—at a moment’s notice—to put our transformative power into action.

A workshop led by the author's Organization for Social, Cultural, Awareness, and Rehabilitation.

A recent report by the Asia Foundation cites corruption—next to security and poverty—as one of the three issues Afghans are most concerned about. A recent example of corruption can be found in the transportation of timber in Kunar. According to a member of the Lower House of Afghanistan’s parliament, who did not want his name to be disclosed, the Afghan Ministry of Finance has estimated that the revenue generated from the transportation of the timber from Kunar to be over 2,000 million Afghanis ($50 million USD), but after the timber was taken away the Kunar provincial government says that they collected just 480 million Afghanis from it. The problem in the Kunar timber industry is just one of the many examples of widespread corruption in the country.

Most Afghans see the direct impact of corruption in their daily lives. We have to pay bribes to the government officials for minor services, such as getting a national identity card. Provincial officials use their political influence to obtain shares in the development projects that are implemented in their province. Nepotism and political corruption has increased to drastic levels. The central Afghan government is not only callous to this, but its complicity is apparent. Meanwhile, provincial officials are becoming increasingly despotic as they compete with one another for more of the spoils. They act is if they are not accountable to the people, the Constitution or a system of law. Unfortunately, they are right.

There is no manner for the population to hold the government to account. In cases of extreme pressure, the central government sends a delegation to evaluate an issue in a province. The delegation goes to the province, spends its time with the corrupt official, and returns with gifts and pockets full of cash. Thousands of such commissions and delegations were made by the Afghan government in the last decade, but they have not shown any positive results.

I have often been asked what are we Afghans doing to change this situation. My answer is always the same: We are not doing anything. Ordinary Afghans feel helpless. We feel stuck with this government, and we feel that international intervention is necessary to make it any different. We are so tired of these paradoxes of conflict that we can only think about our lives at this moment, today. Tomorrow is too far, as if beyond the next mountain. This ethos of survival has made our people passive, and even numb, towards these abuses.

Meanwhile, the Afghan government has done little to win the hearts and minds of its people. It seems that politicians either do not want to act against corrupt officials, because they benefit from the graft, or they are incapable of acting against them, because they are politically so weak. The level of foreign assistance and the careless involvement of the international community generally exacerbates this problem. If the international community intends to achieve the goal of stability by representative democracy, then it needs to start helping Afghan civil society mobilize itself against corruption. Civil society should be encouraged to exercise nonviolent civic mobilization on the local level against corrupt officials.

Some of the tactics of nonviolent civic mobilization, such as protests and boycotts, have already been used in Afghanistan against the government and other entities. Even the Afghan Mujahideen, while fighting against the Soviet occupation in Afghanistan, created a parallel government in Peshawar as a tactic of nonviolent civic mobilization. Further, Afghan culture has some institutions—like the Jirga, a consensus-based tribal assembly—that can be used for mobilizing against corruption.

However, our civil society is not yet well-organized in a way that cuts across ethnic and linguistic boundaries. It lacks the knowledge and experience to launch strong civic mobilization campaigns. A low level of organization in such campaigns can make them easy to hijack by politicians or insurgents.

Nonviolent civic mobilization campaigns are necessary for bringing Afghans from passivity to activity. If people are empowered, then they can affect change in their society. Changing people’s mentality to think that this is even possible, however, is the first and most important step in empowerment. It is a long process and should not be expected to take place overnight.

People must be first educated, disciplined in thought and then mobilized for change. Citizens of Afghanistan must be taught nonviolent conflict as a means of struggle, especially through its roots in Islamic tradition. Afghan civil society throughout the country must convey the message that people have a right to employ nonviolent struggle for making a difference in their lives.

A workshop led by the author's Organization for Social, Cultural, Awareness, and Rehabilitation.

Part of the problem, too, is that Afghan security forces, particularly the police, lack a culture of tolerance. They do not recognize that ordinary citizens have a right to participate in peaceful demonstrations and protests. The Afghan security forces need to be educated in nonviolent civic mobilization and other related legal issues so they do not continue to needlessly suppress peaceful protestors and violate the basic civil rights of others.

Youth across Afghanistan, particularly in big metropolitan centers, have realized the need for nonviolent mobilization. They are mobilizing. Almost every week, we read that youth and university students are taking action for bringing change to their country. Volunteer non-political associations have been established, Facebook groups have been created, and youth are organizing against the status quo of conflict and corruption.

The Arab Spring has shown the world that Muslims can ably employ methods of nonviolence and democracy. Many Afghan youth would like to follow suit, but they lack guidance and direction for implementing such campaigns. They lack expertise in organizing across ethnic groups and mobilizing the whole population. They do not know where to begin or how to begin. They need experience and leadership.

Once Afghans understand that they are empowered, they will find their own ways to eradicate corruption and struggle nonviolently against ineffective officials in their localities. This will help strengthen governance, bringing Afghans closer to a more legitimate democratic government than the international community ever could.

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.

• Cairo and Alexandria witnessed a fresh wave of strikes and protests on Sunday, blocking roads and causing disruption to the work of the Ministry of Transport.

• On Monday, a week-long nationwide strike in Nigeria ended, after Nigerian President Goodluck Jonathan announced in a televised address that fuel will be reduced in price.

• Kuwaiti riot police on Saturday used tear gas and batons to disperse hundreds of stateless demonstrators for the second day in a row and arrested dozens.

• About 4,000 Chinese workers protested over compensation and job security at a Sanyo plant in southern Shenzhen over the weekend in the latest outbreak of labor unrest in China’s manufacturing hub.

• In Oman, thousands of expatriate laborers working for one of the Muscat International Airport projects who have been on strike since Thursday protested in front of their company premises in Azaiba on Sunday. The government’s decision to ban the export of Omani fish to the UAE was “revoked” after over 400 fishermen held a sit-in at Khasab demanding the reversal of the decision on Saturday.

• Activists from a local peace group blocked entry to the main gate at the Navy’s West coast Trident nuclear submarine base Saturday for nearly a half hour in an act of civil resistance to nuclear weapons.

• Police detained a liberal opposition-party leader and another activist Saturday at a rally protesting alleged vote fraud in Russia’s parliamentary election.

• In Pennsylvania, nearly 300 students from two Chester high schools walked out of classes Friday, demanding an end to the financial crisis jeopardizing their school year.

• After five days of a sit-in protest, workers at a lingerie store in Ireland have won their battle for back pay.

• A flash mob of youngsters performed at the crowded Model Town market on Friday afternoon in Delhi as a way of celebrating Lohri with a message against corruption.

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.

“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.

Members of the Afghan Youth for Peace Volunteers in the greenhouse

We were lucky enough to receive an invitation in December to visit a self-run community called Chelsitun on the edge of Kabul in Wasalabad; it’s a mixed Tajik and Pashtun community split into 8 sections, consisting of 2,000 households each having its own representative which implements government initiatives and also manages security in the area.

We were told that the community practices religious and ethnic tolerance and has one of the only Mosques which welcomes joint worship by both Sunnis and Shias with the two Muslim groups sharing funerals and ceremonies. When we arrived in Chelsitun the pathway were unusually set with concrete; an independent initiative by the community (paid for by the people within the area) as a move towards installing proper infrastructure.

Our group was directed into a compound and then into the office of the community elders. It was like stepping back in time into what I imagined pre-war Afghanistan to be like; exquisite prayer mats hung on the war, the traditional ornate Afghan rugs; a greenhouse conservatory made of improvised plastic sheeting with the lushest greenery I have seen since leaving the UK.

We were warmly greeted by an assembly of community elders clad in the traditional Afghan turbans, long white beards; many were wrapped in the classic camel colored Afghan blanket. Once the greetings had been administered the elders took their seats cross legged on the floor. I was amused to see pinned up on the wall a very familiar poster which every co-op in the UK has displayed somewhere—the image of two donkeys tied with a rope heading in different directions trying to reach separate piles of hay, then a picture of the donkeys going towards the same pile of hay and both getting a share. The message: co-operation is better than conflict.

Once we sat down in the nicest of Afghan hospitality the secretary of the group “Tea for Peace” outlined the ethos of their work: “We want to control corruption in the area and the abuse of power especially among the marginalized of the community.” It was interesting to observe that a group of traditional Afghans had taken on ideas and practices you wouldn’t necessarily associate with such a culture. He continued to consult his written notes and explain the group further: “If there is a conflict in the community they bring the two parties together, have tea and aim towards bringing those parties together.”

It quickly struck me that this community was practicing strong elements of anarchism. The middle-aged secretary with round Gandhi-style glasses went to explain that their aim is to bring national unity, to get rid of discrimination whether religious of ethnic, that everyone is free and that no one should be discriminated against. He also emphasized that when interacting with one another they make sure there is no discrimination and that democracy and human rights are practiced within the community. They even have a letter of praise from the Human Rights Commission. They are all working in a voluntary way, and they do not take funds from the government.

One of the other elders chipped in to explain some of the result of their community focus: a concrete pathway, schools and piping for the whole area. This was all brought about as people want control of their area and in affect they’re freed from difficulties with the authorities and the massive current corruption problem of land grabbing.

Another elder with a long white beard and intense eyes stated with passion: “The people want peace so much, they take their lessons from the Quran which says that peace comes from a place of well being. They have no problems with any human being—all people deserve respect.” He went on to explain: “Peace can begin to be built in this country if interference in the region stops and also interference by foreign forces. There has been a betrayal by international communities, especially when the killing of Afghans is silent.” He went onto to explain that the people are under so much pressure with 44 NATO countries who are supporting the land grabbing and government. There are no honest people who work for the government. If the people rise they will face guns. The U.S. is behaving like a dictator and that’s not what the people want.

I learned that for their work within “Tea for Peace” they very much believe in empowering people, they feel it’s important for the people to get together and form a group, to work from the foundations addressing the root problem. To bring reconciliation where there is conflict they also use their faith.

Their words made be remember a teaching in the Quran which AYPV Roz Mohammed had shared with us only the day before. It roughly translates that God made lots of tribes on the earth so people can get to know one other (apparently it is written in the prayer room at Kabul Airport).

There was strong consensus in the group of elders that involvement of international forces has been extremely unhelpful and detrimental on various levels ranging from the bombing of civilians on the one hand by international forces against the people. It would be better for both sides to sit down together, with no party left out of resolution process. Internationals need to support the people, otherwise they won’t solve the problem

I was interested to hear about how they would deal with the Taliban, especially as international forces use the Taliban as one of the main justifications for being in Afghanistan. The elder with the big white turban addressed the question: “The Taliban themselves have been nurtured by foreign elements. The mujahudeen had been armed by the U.S., while the people of Afghanistan are trapped in a game which is hard to get out of. If there was no foreign interference then the Taliban could sit down with other Afghans and deal with their own problems, but with foreign interference there is always a condition which they will find impossible to accept. Afghans themselves can sit down together, however, it is impossible with foreign interference.”

Kathy Kelly asked a question relating to the planned Silk Road Path running through the country which will allow the transportation of raw materials mined within Afghanistan and will also act as a central trading route for the countries surrounding Afghanistan. A cross legged elder immediately jumped in: “It is very clear to Afghans that any minerals taken away from the country will not benefit the people. If in an ideal situation the pipeline and minerals went to helping the people of Afghanistan then that is acceptable, Afghans will not accept these initiatives. They can not accept them if this mining is being owned by foreigners. Foreign businesses must realize that they will not be able to exploit these natural resources unless the conflict is resolved.”

Another elder then chipped in: “The people that the U.S./ NATO have placed in power are thieves and murderers. They need to be taken out of power and placed somewhere else. If they could fill the parliament with 100 members of the people then peace would come to the country.”

The meeting ended with the message that unity is the key to uniting the people of Afghanistan. With the elite in power they do not understand how the common people live. Foreign money to the government disappears before it gets to them. If we want change then you can’t expect the current people in Parliament to bring it. We need representatives from the people.

It was very exciting for me to hear these viewpoints, I got the impression that their opinions hadn’t been formed by reading political books but from their first hand experience, wisdom and intelligence.

We were then shown around the lush greenhouse warmed by the traditional Afghan wood stove. I got to duck into the living quarters of an elder (to use the restroom) whereby I was fortunate enough to meet children playing in the yard and some of the women. It was explained to me that an extended family of around 45 people lived in the homes surrounding the yard and there was a communal water well where those in the area without running water come for supplies. I was very impressed by the organization of the community and radical ethos of the “Tea for Peace” group, which was definitely not what I or most Westerners would necessarily expect.

• A national strike paralyzed much of Nigeria on Monday, with more than 10,000 demonstrators swarming its commercial capital to protest soaring fuel prices and decades of government corruption in the oil-rich country.

• Tensions flared at the American Licorice factory Monday as protesters associated with the Occupy Oakland movement joined the month-old factory workers’ strike, blocking entrances and turning away delivery trucks.

• Over five hundred people in the French city of Clermont-Ferrand attended the silent march on Saturday, to show their support for Wissam El-Yamini, a thirty years old man who went into coma following his violent arrest on New Year’s Eve.

• Tens of thousands demonstrating in Yemen’s capital Sanaa on Friday chanted “freedom to the detainees,” a slogan chosen by protest organizers for demonstrations in 18 cities across the impoverished nation.

• Around ten thousand people blocked railways and the Aswan-Cairo highway in the Upper Egyptian City of Nagaa-Hammadi, Qena, late on Friday, to protest the results of the ongoing parliamentary elections in their constituency.

• More than 20 Omanis continue their prison hunger strike, which began in mid-December, in protest at what they say are unfair sentences for taking part in demonstrations last year.

• In Turkey, police dispersed scores of anti-NATO activists in the southern city of Adana on Friday as they were setting up tents to stage a three-day hunger strike to show their opposition to the NATO missile system that will be established in the eastern province of Malatya.

• On Friday, thousands of shopkeepers in the Indian portion of Kashmir went on a daylong general strike to protest the killing of a student and frequent power cuts.

• A group of parents whose children attend Chicago Public Schools slated for “turnarounds,” closures or other adjustments protested the plan with a sit-in at City Hall Thursday, where they vowed to stay until Mayor Rahm Emanuel granted them a meeting to discuss alternatives.

• Dozens of street dance enthusiasts in Hangzhou, the capital of east China’s Zhejiang Province, participated in a flash mob activity advocating environmental protection last Tuesday.

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.