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.

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Did I get your attention? While titles that draw attention to women’s physical features may summon most of the male population, a title like, Women, War and Peace was probably written off as a women-only television series. You know: “girl’s stuff” or women-as-victims drama.

Over the past month, the U.S. Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) aired a fascinating series that showed real women around the world in their roles as serious nonviolent organizers. The five-part film series, now completely available online, offers five cases of women’s activism in the following contexts (I have edited the website’s language with a nonviolent conflict perspective, bolding the significant political achievements of their efforts):

I Came to Testify is a story of how 16 Bosnian women who had been imprisoned and raped by Serb-led forces in the Bosnian town of Foca broke history’s great silence – and stepped forward to take the witness stand in an international court of law. Their courage resulted in a triumphant verdict that led to new international laws about sexual violence in war.

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• Nurses, transit workers and other union members swelled the growing protest movement in New York’s financial district to around 5,000 on Wednesday. Later in the evening, a breakaway group of around 100 to 200 attempted to link arms and breach the barricade blocking Wall Street. At least 23 were arrested, some facing pepper spray and police batons.

• The Occupy Wall Street movement has expanded to protests in more than a dozen cities, including: Tampa, Florida; Trenton and Jersey City, New Jersey, Philadelphia, and Norfolk, Virginia in the East; to Chicago and St. Louis in the Midwest; Houston, San Antonio and Austin in Texas; Nashville, Tennessee; and Portland, Oregon, Seattle and Los Angeles in the West.

• Hundreds of Afghans have marched through the capital, Kabul, on the eve of the 10-year anniversary of the invasion of Afghanistan, condemning the US as occupiers and demanding the immediate withdrawal of all foreign troops.

• Several hundred people gathered Thursday in Washington DC for a scheduled anti-war demonstration that also adopted new overtones in decrying economic disparities.

• Air traffic controllers at Cairo airport protested a cancelled pay increase with a go-slow that grounded four fifths of flights from the major regional hub and left as many as 3,000 travelers stranded on Thursday.

• Thousands of Bedouins demonstrated in the southern city of Beersheva on Thursday to protest a government project they say will displace tens of thousands of people from their land.

• Hundreds of Afghans have taken to the streets of Kabul to condemn the recent shelling of border towns by Pakistan’s army and accusing its powerful spy agency of involvement in the killing of Burhanuddin Rabbani, the country’s influential former president.

• Corrections officials in Sacramento said Thursday that they would discipline inmates who participated in a renewed hunger strike to protest conditions in the state’s highest-security prisons, where some prisoners have been held in virtual isolation for decades.

• Hundreds of people filled a small town gymnasium in Nebraska on Thursday to protest at a State Department hearing on the proposed Keystone XL oil pipeline from Canada to Texas. Residents fear it will pollute the Ogallala Aquifer, a major U.S. drinking water source.

• Tens of thousands marched in Lisbon and Porto on Saturday to protest austerity measures imposed under the terms of an EU/IMF bailout, the first major rallies since a center-right government took power in Portugal in June.

• U.S. actor Sean Penn joined thousands of Egyptian activists who packed downtown Cairo on Friday demanding that military rulers speed up the transfer of power to civilians and end emergency laws once used by Hosni Mubarak against his opponents.

• Hundreds of indigenous Bolivians angry at plans to build a highway through an Amazon nature preserve resumed their protest march Saturday after a violent police crackdown a week ago.

• Thousands of Syrians took to the streets on Friday in demonstrations against the regime. Human rights activists said that at least 13 people were killed when troops opened fire.

• More than 1,000 people gathered in Savannah, Georgia on Saturday to attend the funeral of Troy Davis, the recently executed death row inmate many believe was innocent. They pledged to keep fighting the death penalty.

• Dutch police forcibly dispersed around 200 squatters in the center of Amsterdam on Saturday during a protest on the first anniversary of the introduction of a law formally outlawing squatting.

• Thousands Hungarians rallied in central Budapest against the measures of Prime Minister Viktor Orban at a demonstration organizers dubbed “D-Day.” Their demands included “fair” taxation, the constitutional protection of early retirement, the restoration of the right to strike, social dialog and the scrapping of retroactive laws.

• More than 200 Tibetans, including monks, protested in a tense area of southwestern China on the country’s 62nd National Day after a Tibetan flag and a photo of the Dalai Lama were torn down, a news report said Sunday.

• British unions organized a rally of 35,000 protesters against government budget cuts Sunday in Manchester where the Conservative Party opened its annual conference.

With newly retired General David Petraeus sworn in as the head of the Central Intelligence Agency last week, we are reminded, as the New York Times put it back in April when he was appointed to the position, that this is only “the latest evidence of a significant shift over the past decade in how the United States fights its battles — the blurring of lines between soldiers and spies in secret American missions abroad.” This shift of the agency’s function from gathering “intelligence” (we wish) to carrying out murderous operations has been going on steadily, and we all know what it means: torture has been enshrined as a regular feature of our military enterprise. CIA personnel regularly torture prisoners, regularly cover up much, but not all, of the evidence for these heinous crimes against humanity, and have, up to now, been winked at by the public and Congress for the part that comes to light.

Of course, this shift intensified after 9/11, and the tenth anniversary of that horrific day has given us an occasion to really revisit what it means. We should be aware that no people can survive such degradation of their most basic values. When the CIA/US Army shifts more and more to paramilitary operations it shifts more and more out of the few safeguards that were erected around  modern militaries to prevent them from carrying out grave abuse. It makes them look more like the death squads of Central America and Colombia than a democratic institution.

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Brock McIntosh (left) and Jacob George, via Military Families Speak Out.

Last night at NYU’s Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies, on the south side of Washington Square Park, Jacob George and Brock McIntosh spoke on behalf of Iraq Veterans Against the War about their experiences in Afghanistan, both as US Army soldiers and, most recently, as members of a Voices for Creative Nonviolence delegation.

They said a lot of good stuff. But one part that especially stuck out for your Waging Nonviolence correspondent was how McIntosh responded to a question about the prospects for nonviolence education both in the US military itself and among Afghans. He’s uncommonly optimistic about the latter, and he’s in a good position to know. Currently a conscientious objector in the National Guard, he has been spending the past year or so attending the best nonviolence trainings he can find, as well as making contacts among Afghans interested in fostering a culture of powerful nonviolence in their country.

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Note, among much else, his mention of the impact of recent WNV contributor Maria Stephan‘s book Civilian Jihad.

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Sometimes, when one belongs to the richest and most militarily over-equipped country in the world, there’s a bit of a temptation to overthink things. I was reminded of this at the end of my interview—just published at The Immanent Frame—with the great Pakistani anthropologist Saba Mahmood. I asked the tangled question of what American women can do to help their Afghan counterparts. Some American feminist groups, you might recall, were among those who mobilized to support the initial invasion of Afghanistan in 2001. Her reply was thorough, though the gist of it was plain: “Stop bombing them.”

The entire social fabric of Afghani society has been torn apart as a result of, first the war between the United States and the Soviet Union, between 1979 and 1989, and then the U.S. war against the Taliban and now al-Qaeda. There are civilian casualties reported almost every day—the vast majority of whom are women, children, and the elderly—as a result of U.S. bombs and drones. This violence exceeds and parallels the violence unleashed by the Taliban on the Afghanis.  We read about these casualties in the media, but I do not see any mobilization by major U.S. feminist organizations to demand an end to this calamity. This silence stands in sharp contrast to the vast public campaign organized by the Feminist Majority in the late 1990s to oust the Taliban. I am often asked by American feminists what they can do to help Afghan women. My simple and short answer is: first, convince your government to stop bombing them, and second urge the US government to help create the conditions for a political—and not a military—solution to the impasse in Afghanistan. It is the condition of destitution and constant war that has driven Pakistanis and Afghans to join the Taliban (coupled with the opportunistic machinations of their own governments). Perhaps it is time to asses whether diverting the U.S. military aid toward more constructive and systemic projects of economic and political reform might yield different results.

Mahmood also discusses her debt to Talal Asad, whom I interviewed, also for The Immanent Frame, earlier this month.

Refugee Camp in Kabul. (Photo: Jacob George)

It’s a bit odd to me that with my sense of geographical direction I’m ever regarded as a leader to guide groups in foreign travel. I’m recalling a steaming hot night in Lahore, Pakistan when Josh Brollier and I, having enjoyed a lengthy dinner with Lahore University students, needed to head back to the guest lodgings graciously provided us by a headmaster of the Garrison School for Boys. We had boarded a rickshaw, but the driver had soon become terribly lost and with my spotty sense of direction and my complete ignorance of Urdu, I couldn’t be any help. My cell phone was out of juice, and I was uncertain anyway of the needed phone number. I bumped and jostled in the back seat of the rickshaw, next to Josh, as we embarked on a nightmare of travel over unpaved, rutted roads in dizzying traffic until finally the rickshaw driver spotted a sign belonging to our school – the wrong campus, we all knew – and eager to unload us, roused the inhabitants and hustled us and our bags into the street before moving on.

We stood inside the gate, staring blankly at a family that had been sound asleep on cots in the courtyard. In no time, the father of the family scooped up his two children, gently moving them to the cot he shared with his wife so that Josh and I would have a cot on which to sit. Then he and his spouse disappeared into their humble living quarters. He reappeared with a fan and an extension cord, wanting to give us some relief from the blistering night heat. His wife emerged carrying a glass of tea for each of us. They didn’t know us from Adam’s house cat, but they were treating us as family – the celebrated but always astonishing hospitality that we’d encountered in the region so many times before. Eventually, we established with our host that we were indeed at the wrong campus, upon which he called the family that had been nervously waiting for our errant selves.

This courtyard scene of startling hospitality would return to my mind when we all learned of the U.S. Joint Special Operations (JSO) Force night raid in the Nangarhar province, on May 12, 2011. No matter which side of the Afghanistan/Pakistan border you are on, suffocating hot temperatures prevail day and night during these hot months. It’s normal for people to sleep in their courtyards. How could anyone living in the region not know this? Yet the U.S. JSO forces that came in the middle of the night to the home of a 12-year-old girl, Nilofer, who had been asleep on her cot in the courtyard, began their raid by throwing a grenade into the courtyard, landing at Nilofer’s head. She died instantly. Nilofer’s uncle raced into the courtyard. He worked with the Afghan Local Police, and they had told him not to join that night’s patrol because he didn’t know much about the village they would go to, so he had instead gone to his brother’s home. When he heard the grenade explode, he may well have presumed the Taliban were attacking the home. U.S. troops killed him as soon as they saw him. Later, NATO issued an apology.

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• More than 100 environmental activists from across the country descended on Montana Gov. Brian Schweitzer’s office Tuesday to demand that he rescind his support for the Keystone XL oil pipeline and the ExxonMobil megaload transportation project. Six of the activists are occupying the lobby of the governor’s office indefinitely.

• Thousands of Egyptians marched on the cabinet headquarters in central Cairo on Tuesday to demand the removal of the ruling military council. Meanwhile, in Alexandria, hundreds of demonstrators cordoned off the stock exchange building, posting a sign that reads, “Closed until all revolution demands are met!”

• Hundreds gathered outside the White House on Monday to protest the Colombia free trade agreement, which they say will kill jobs here, and threaten communities in Colombia.

• Thousands of Greek Cypriots have marched on the presidential palace in Nicosia to protest the deaths of 12 people in a blast at a navy base.

• Several dozen union workers gathered at a downtown state office building yesterday to protest Illinois Gov. Pat Quinn’s decision to block raises for 33,000 employees.

• Opponents of Senate Bill 1070, Arizona’s immigration law, marched to Chase Field Tuesday afternoon to picket outside Major League Baseball’s All-Star Game.

• Workers at state-owned Corporacion del Cobre de Chile, the world’s biggest copper producer, went on strike Monday to protest a modernization plan they see as a step toward privatization.

• South Korean female activist Kim Jin-Suk began the 188th day of a sit-in on Tuesday atop a giant crane to protest major layoffs at a South Korean shipyard.

• Hundreds of Afghans took to the streets Monday to protest cross-border shelling from Pakistan that has killed dozens of people in recent weeks.

• More than a hundred people gathered in Morris Cove—New Haven, Connecticut’s easternmost area—last weekend to protest the Army Corps of Engineers’ plan to dump 250,000 cubic yards of toxic dredging waste in New Haven Harbor. They were joined by a flotilla of 43 kayaks and power boats, which processed around the dumping site.

• Tens of thousands of Syrians demanding the downfall of the nation’s government poured into the streets of the central city of Hama on Friday.

• Thousands of Yemenis angered by President Ali Abdullah Saleh’s first televised address since an attack on his palace protested across the country on Friday and renewed their call for the formation of an interim council, which they say would be the only way for acting president Abd-Rabou Mansur to end the stalemate.

• About 600,000 public sector workers went on strike across Britain last week to protest proposed cuts in pensions.

• In the latest countrywide opposition protests against Belarussian President Alexander Lukashenko’s regime on Wednesday at least 180 people were arrested in Minsk and 220 in other regional centres.

• A group of Nashville students is protesting the deportation proceedings for a recent high school graduate with rallies outside the Davidson County Sheriff’s Office calling for an end to the county’s participation in a federal program that screens anyone who is arrested for immigration status.

• Police have tear gassed several hundred protesters marching toward the offices of Kenya’s president and prime minister to demand action over a growing hunger crisis.

• Hundreds of people in eastern Afghanistan gathered yesterday to protest the deaths of up to 13 civilians, including women and children, in a Nato air strike.