Category Archives: Resistance

McCain’s best “Maverick” Performance: as a witness against torture

In the process Haspel had a major stroke of luck: she was spared a showdown with the Senate’s most visible and respected torture opponent. One can only imagine what a confrontation that might have been: Haspel, impassive, well-shielded by kevlar secrecy and talking points, versus a legendary torture survivor.

Still, the confrontation was not wholly imaginary; it did happen, but was epistolary: McCain, losing one last medical battle, took time to write a lengthy and trenchant letter to Haspel, which was filled with tough observations and demanding questions. Here are a few:

“These techniques included the practice of waterboarding, forced nudity and humiliation, facial and abdominal slapping, dietary manipulation, stress positions, cramped confinement, striking, and more than 48 hours of sleep deprivation. We now know that these techniques not only failed to deliver actionable intelligence, but actually produced false and misleading information. Most importantly, the use of torture compromised our values, stained our national honor, and threatened our historical reputation. . . .

As you know, many detainees under the custody of the CIA in the wake of the September 11th attacks were subjected to waterboarding and other “enhanced interrogation techniques.” In just one case, a Libyan detainee and his pregnant wife were rendered to a foreign country, where the woman was bound, gagged, and photographed naked as several American intelligence officers watched.

Do you believe actions like these were justified, and do you believe they produced actionable intelligence?

What is your assessment today of the effectiveness of “enhanced interrogation techniques” and their impact on the United States’ moral standing in the world?

It is not known if McCain ever got replies to these and other questions in the letter. Haspel was confirmed by the Senate as CIA Director on April 17, 2018. McCain was in Arizona, undergoing treatment, and did not vote. The epic confrontation was muffled and squirreled away in an online footnote.

A Carolina Lynching, But No Carolina Justice: John Jeffress Remembrance Day, August 25, 1920

In the version of this report published in the Charlotte NC News, additional details were included:

Sheriff Story [sic] and his six assistants started with Jeffress to the courthouse one block away. Arriving at the spot where Ray was killed, a mob formed around the Officers and their prisoner. There was a sudden surge forward and in the twinkling of an eye, according to the sheriff, the prisoner had been taken from the officers and was placed in an automobile and rushed away. There was not a shot fired: not even a gun drawn during the minute scuffle between the mob and officers.

Sheriff Storey said tonight that resistance would have been folly as the mob was made up of between 25 and 50 determined men. There were at least 150 additional men nearby whose sympathies were with the- mob, he stated tonight. Answering a. direct question, Sheriff Story declared that he did not know anyone in the mob. The man who led the mob and took the prisoner away, the sheriff said, must have just moved into the county and was not known to him.

David McReynolds: Peace Movement Titan Is Gone

I only sort of knew David McReynolds, but he hovered significantly in the background of peace work during my apprenticeship in the Vietnam years.

David McReynolds, pacifist organizer stalwart, October 25, 1929- August 17, 2018.
My most vivid memory of David was not a personal encounter, but in the pages of WIN Magazine, a “radical pacifist” journal published by the War Resisters League. In 1969 he joined several other elder eminences in coming out there. These were the first confrontations I had had with homosexuals as sympathetic figures and colleagues.

His article was more personal than political, often embarrassed about how much his struggles in and out of the closet had cut into his driving impulse to organize nonviolent action against war and imperialism. Its candor and humility cut right through my unthinking, reflexive homophobia, pointing a way forward from it which I have worked ever since to follow.

Friends Central School Lawsuit: The Fired Teachers Begin to Make Their Case

“At first blush, this matter deals simply with a motion to dismiss a civil rights case with pendent claims as Defendants claim protection under the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment to the U.S Constitution. However, the attack amounts to something much more, something dangerously precedent-setting were it to be approved, namely that a private school and those affiliated with it are exempt from the reach of Federal and State Civil Rights Acts. This is all despite Friends Central’s professed adherence to notions of responsibility, equality and diversity. When the rubber meets the road, these Defendants are insisting that they are untouchable and above it all.

However, Defendants fail any applicable test. In no way do Plaintiffs’ claims require inquiry into religious tenets of Quakerism. Plaintiffs do not make any claims or counts based therein. Rather, Plaintiffs Complaint references guidelines and policies set forth by the school so as to depict the environment in which Plaintiffs worked and to justify their adherence to those guidelines and policies. . . .

Should this Court accept Defendants’ arguments, then there is nothing to keep any purportedly religious school from claiming immunity from the Civil Rights laws, or any other laws for that matter, taking us back to the dark ages in American jurisprudence. . . .