By Brian Terrel
August 25, 2009
On August 9, the anniversary of the bombing of Nagasaki, I was one of more than 50 participants of the “Walk for Peace,” a three day, thirty mile march calling for the end of the US wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, bringing home all National Guard troops and the abolition of nuclear weapons, that ended at the gates of Fort McCoy. Fort McCoy is a military training center in Wisconsin from which National Guard units from around the United States are deployed to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Nine of us carried our protest onto the base after being warned by the US Army Police not to enter. If our plea for peace was deemed by the Army an “unlawful activity,” we explained, we respectfully could not comply with their order. We were taken into custody, as we expected and each was issued a citation for a federal petty offense requiring us to appear in court at a later date. Five of us were soon released and we four others were further detained, because, it was explained, we had each been apprehended at previous protests at the Fort and we were to be held at the base for US Marshals to transport us to the Dane County Jail in Madison. Except that we had already just been served citations, this was not unusual. We who had more “history” at Fort McCoy were already resigned to the possibility that we might be taken by Marshals to a local jail and held pending an appearance in US District Court, probably the next morning.
What actually happened was something like what we thought might happen but with a subtle twist. When the Marshals did not show after more than three hours, there was an abrupt change of plans. The sergeant in charge of guarding us at the base announced that he and another officer would take us to Madison, 70 miles away, themselves and so we were put in chains and taken to Madison in an Army van.
My night in the Dane County Jail was certainly one of the pleasantest that I have ever passed in my years of lodging in many such institutions. I slept much better in my cell there than I had in the two previous nights in a dripping tent and sodden sleeping bag on the walk. The jail staff was invariably polite, as were the inmates that I met, and some genuinely compassionate. We were a novelty, certainly, and our status grew only more confused the next morning when no one came to take us to court as the jail staff and we ourselves expected to happen.
Jail inmates, the US Constitution says, must have either been convicted of a crime and sentenced there by a judge or are in custody pending various court hearings. Our own situation, it became apparent through the morning, was different from the usual. At 1 pm, 24 hours after we were arrested at Fort McCoy, we were released with the explanation that the Army was lifting its hold on us, and it began to dawn on me just how extra-constitutional our detention was. Friends wanting to be with us in court had called the clerk earlier that morning and found there had been no hearing scheduled for us. We found out later that the federal prosecutor did not even know that we had been taken into custody and he ordered our immediate release as soon as he found out. We had been held in jail simply by order of the United States Army and we do not know how long our summary sentence was to last, had the prosecutor for the Justice Department not intervened.
In the weeks since, I have been talking with friends and ruminating over what this clear violation of the Posse Comitatus Act, which restricts the military from acting as domestic police, might mean. Does it make any difference what branch of the government had us locked up? In one sense, the difference is negligible. My sleep that night could not have been more peaceful in the custody of the Attorney General. In another sense, though, the difference is crucial.
The demarcation between the military and civil spheres in America has its roots in revolutionary protest of King George III’s use of British soldiers as police, judges, jailers and even executioners. The Insurrection Act and later the Posse Comitatus Act restricted the government from using the military even to assist civilian police. While there have always been some abuses, it is this line that has kept the United States from being an out and out military dictatorship. It has been eroded in recent years in ways much more outrageous ways than our little experience at Fort McCoy. The military claims the right to hold prisoners, even US citizens, indefinitely by simply labeling them “enemy combatants” without recourse to the courts. The Pentagon further is already building a domestic military force, 20,000 troops expected by 2011, trained to “help state and local officials” in the case of terrorist attack, natural disaster and “civil unrest.”
This line between the Army and the police is not the only line that is progressively blurring. Besides the Walk for Peace, I have recently been involved with other campaigns against the current and threatened aggressive wars and occupations. It is occurring to me after my Fort McCoy experience that there is a common thread weaving through these various efforts that I have been part of. There is a systematic blurring and eroding lines, distinctions and definitions by our Empire in its last few administrations that might otherwise keep the barbarity of war in check.
Last summer I spent ten days in the District of Columbia Jail for the crime of “causing a harangue” in the Supreme Court, demanding the right of habeas corpus for Guantanamo detainees. Criminal defendants or prisoners of war, civilians or soldiers, combatants or not, these men are all of these and none of them at the same time. The protections or rights afforded to any do not extend to them and even distinctions of guilt and innocence do not matter. They will be in prison so long as our government wants them to be. The Obama administration can’t seem to close Guantanamo as it had promised and the numbers held at the prison at Bagram in Afghanistan are escalating.
In April I was in Nevada for a ten day vigil at Creech Air Force Base, the site from which many of the unmanned aerial drones launched from sites in Afghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan are flown by remote control. From computer terminals on this airbase more than 7000 miles from their targets, deadly missiles and bombs are launched. Despite state of the art video feed from these drones, they kill with little distinction between combatants and children and they count more of their victims among the latter. Killing from so far away also blurs the lines about those who engage in combat from a place of safety and then go home to their families. Are these “pilots” combatants or not? Their status is no clearer than that of their victims and high rates of PTSD among drone operators prove the psychic cost of this confusion.
Later that month I helped plan and participated in a “citizens’ foreclosure” of a training camp in Illinois run by Xe, the mercenary corporation formerly known as Blackwater. Such private “contractors” outnumber soldiers in our occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan and many have committed atrocities against the people of those countries. Here again the lines are blurred- are they soldiers, subject to military discipline or civilians answerable to civil law? They are, again, both and neither and so there is no accountability. Just this past week it has surfaced both that it is Blackwater mercenaries who actually load the “Hellfire” missiles onto the drones in Pakistan and also that Blackwater had been contracted to transport “special rendition” prisoners from Guantanamo to be tortured in secret prisons around Asia, a chilling but not surprising convergence of obfuscations.
Ever more technologically complex and precise weapons decrease, rather than increase any sense of discrimination in warfare and with each advance, more children are killed. A study by The New England Journal of Medicine published April 16, showed that 39% of those killed in US-led coalition airstrikes in Iraq using high-tech weaponry were children (another 46% were women) while only 12% of low-tech suicide bombers’ victims are children. Nuclear weapons are, of course, the least discriminatory weapons of all. Our government’s current research and development of “bunker-buster” bombs and “mini-nukes” blurs the line between conventional and nuclear weapons and subverts international agreements, threatening all life on our planet more than the waywardness of any rogue state.
We are thrown into a Babel of confusion where it cannot be clearly discerned among either perpetrator or victim whom is soldier and whom is civilian.
On one level it is true that to their victims it does not matter whether missiles are fired by a drone or a manned fighter plane. It matters not whether the bullet was fired by an enlisted soldier or a mercenary contractor. Thousands with habeas corpus rights intact suffer injustice in American prisons and it is far from certain that those who suffer at Guantanamo would find relief in American courts even if they had the access now denied. Cities can be devastated by weapons on either side of the arbitrary distinction between nuclear and conventional weapons. The lives of soldiers and combatants on any side are as precious as the lives of civilians. On this level, too, but of infinitely less consequence, it does not matter whether our night in the Dane County Jail was at the behest of the Army or that of the civilian authorities. These definitions and lines of distinction are all false and all weapons, all prisons are evils to be condemned and the lives of all people regardless of nationality or uniform to be equally nurtured and protected.
On another level, however, these distinctions are critical because it is this blurring of lines, this fudging of distinctions that enables and abets all forms of abuse of human beings. Killing or torture is thus so much easier. Alibis come easier to hand. It is, in fact, this blurring of lines that is the métier of modern warfare.
When we get our day in court to answer to the citations served us on August 9, we might argue that the actions that got us arrested were not crimes at all. Ours were the actions of responsible citizens in the face of a lawless military establishment that increasingly acts as though it is free to disregard the lines and boundaries that might otherwise keep its excesses in check. It is the Army, not us, who is trespassing on the lines of civilized behavior. A lawless Army will not respect even the boundary of our national borders and our experience is but a most benign manifestation of trespasses coming home. We spent our night in jail not as principled disobedients but as victims of a crime.
One of my “sisters in chains” from Fort McCoy and the Dane County Jail has labeled our experience there as “paltry,” and indeed, it is so. If our story is worth recounting or worth a second thought in this world of grief and peril, it is only as a bellwether, as a tale of caution for our own future and of the present condition of many. When the US Army in Madison, Wisconsin, of all places, can usurp the powers of the police and the courts to lock up four nonviolent protestors even for one night, we are in for trouble!
How shall we respond to this paltry event? We four are weighing voluminous quantities of advice, much of it wildly contradictory, some quite vehement, all well meant. I pray that however we respond, it will take us along the same road that brought us to Fort McCoy in the first place and in solidarity with those other, greater victims of the blurring of lines who do not have our voice.
Brian Terrell lives and works at Strangers and Guests Catholic Worker Farm in remote Maloy, Iowa.He can be contacted via email, terrellcpm@yahoo.com
