01/22/15 – Kathy Kelly – The Scott Horton Show

Oh, John Kerry's Mideast Peace Talks have gone nowhere.
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All right, guys, welcome back.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show, The Scott Horton Show.
Our next guest is the heroic Kathy Kelly, great American peace activist from Voices in the Wilderness.
Usually whenever I talk to you, you're in Afghanistan trying to get food and books to hungry and illiterate people.
Kathy, welcome back to the show.
How are you?
Oh, thank you, Scott.
Well, I'm good.
I'm tired, actually, not to be in Afghanistan.
Really, my main role is either to do the dishes or listen, really do a lot of listening.
But I'm in Chicago because it seems that tomorrow I'll be in a prison, and I'm awaiting word from the Bureau of Prisons about what prison I should go to.
But anyway, I've been sentenced to three months in prison for carrying a loaf of bread across a line at the White Man Air Force Base where they are bombing Afghanistan and doing a great deal of surveillance using drone warfare.
OK, well, first of all, where is that base?
And second of all, why a loaf of bread?
Well, White Man Air Force Base is in Nob, Nofter, Missouri.
It's a huge base.
And they are now operating drones.
One squadron at the base operates both weaponized and surveillance drones over Afghanistan.
And it's very traditional in Afghanistan to have every meal with a loaf of bread and people sitting on the floor in a circle and a chance to talk after the meal.
So I thought, well, why not bring a loaf of bread and a letter to the base and try to talk to the commander?
I've come from Afghanistan.
I have a constitutionally protected right to assemble peaceably for redress of grievance.
My young friends in Afghanistan have no chance whatsoever to talk with the commander.
So I thought maybe I should try to do that along with my friend, Georgia Walker, and others in the Kansas City, Jeff City area peace movement.
So now you've – I'm sorry.
Did you already say you've been sentenced to do three months in the federal penitentiary?
Is that right?
Yeah, that's true.
Wow.
And I read in an interview – we're posting it on the blog there, I think, at Antiwar.com, your interview that Medea Benjamin did, and she – well, you answered her.
You've been to jail more times than you can count.
Is that right?
Well, that's true.
I mean, a lot of overnights or county jails across the country for what I think is this constitutionally protected First Amendment right to assemble peaceably for redress of grievance, but also if we had the necessity defense in this country, if you could say you acted in order to prevent a greater harm, such as massive slaughter and acted through warfare, then I would have many, many less experiences in county jails.
Yeah.
Does that make sense?
I mean, what I'm saying is that we can't bring the necessity defense normally into a U.S. court.
The magistrates and the prosecutors will just reduce things down to did you or didn't you cross that line, without any question about why ever in the world a group of people who often are, you know, some of the most active in terms of community service in the entire community feel that they have to serve the cause of justice and stop the United States' war making, and so they go right to the military places or the weapon making places or legislative places and do cross lines.
Yeah.
And now, was this the case where – I know there was one recently where the judge actually surprisingly let quite a bit of the necessity defense into the trial.
Well, we were amazed.
Way back in 2009, a number of us went to Creech Air Force Base, where there will be now a national mobilization March 4th through 6th, and that's in Las Vegas, Nevada.
The judge let Bill Quigley, Ramsey Clark, and Colonel Ann Wright testify, and at the end of the trial – I mean, this judge had done 25 years on the bench hearing a lot of traffic ticket cases, and he was fascinated by this day in court, and he listened to Brian Terrell's sum up, you know, the classic, if the house is on fire and the baby is trapped inside and you go in and you save the baby, should you be arrested for breaking and entering?
And the judge said, I need to think about this for four months.
Truthfully, he found us guilty after four months, but he sentenced us to time served.
It's a discussion that is happening, but I think one of the reasons it's happening is because people like Medea Benjamin and Brian Terrell and many activists with Voices for Creative Nonviolence and up in Syracuse, where there are steady actions and trials and out at Creech Air Force Base, Beale Air Force Base, Whiteman Air Force Base, people are raising the issue and saying we want to put the brakes on and discuss the proliferation of drone warfare.
Yeah, and I got the name of your organization wrong at the beginning, too.
It used to be Voices in the Wilderness.
We changed our name.
Sadly, we didn't end the economic sanctions against Iraq, but I was glad to see on AntiWar.com's website today the highlighted article by Mr. Hornberger, which includes mention of the economic sanctions against Iraq and the many ways that the United States bullied and waged warfare against people in Iraq, and that has to be taken into consideration as we look at Iraq today.
Yeah, absolutely.
And now, real quick, because we're almost out of time.
Well, I guess we've got four minutes or so.
Tell us, what's it like to be an Afghan living under drones?
Well, my young friends, first of all, cannot go back and visit their families in many cases.
They might be targeted, they might be tracked, and their families say, no, don't come, it's not safe.
On the other hand, 70% of Afghanistan, according to some very credible sources doing on-the-ground medical care work there, like the Network of Emergency Hospitals Workers, 70% of the country is under the control of Taliban warlords, of drug warlords, of corrupt officials.
So, what good is all this surveillance and all of the targeted assassinations accomplished?
After all these years, Afghanistan is back where it was in 2001, under control of armed and corrupt and under-educated people.
So, does the intelligence we need happen?
It's very hard to figure out how many children in that country are starving, how many families can't feed their children or give them clean water, how many places are so subject to squalid, sprawling refugee camps that it becomes a healthcare disaster, how many women tried to immolate themselves this year.
There were 400 attempts at immolation in Afghanistan last year.
These are the kinds of things we need to understand.
We need to become literate in these realities.
Otherwise, we're flying blind, bumbling around, spending this year $58.6 billion on the military in Afghanistan for the war that the President just told us is over.
How many mercenaries, armed military contractors are there in Afghanistan?
We don't know.
And then when we look at the history, I mean, Leon Panetta had said back in 2011, I believe, when he was asked how many Al-Qaeda figures are there in Afghanistan, he said, oh, about 55.
So, we lack information, and that's deplorable.
And what other countries are ever going to want to work with us when we're considered one of the most menacing, frightening countries in the world?
And I can tell you, people in Afghanistan feel frightened and terrified.
Who is the terrorist?
That's a really important question.
Yeah.
Now, this sounds maybe crass and a very narrow point, but I'm just curious, and I wonder if you know, to the regular peasants on the ground being bombed by the empire over there, does it make a difference to them that the drones don't even have pilots in them?
That in the off chance that the thing crashed, that there's not even a human in there at any risk whatsoever, flying around, killing them, or it's the same difference if it was a F-16 or a guy with a machine gun?
Well, they don't hesitate to use the word cowardice, but I think that the difference is also that when it's flying around, when the robot is flying overhead, it's in conjunction with the likelihood that a night raid, peopled by some very frightening, horrifically armed people, might burst into their homes.
If the drone is flying around, it could mean that the Taliban are going to say, hey, somebody in your village must be in touch with intelligence from some other country, and the Taliban will come in, frightfully armed, and kill them.
So people see that drone, they don't wait to ask or debate, you know, philosophically, is that an act of cowardice?
They pick up their belongings and run, and that's why the refugee camps are so overcrowded.
The cold weather is coming, people don't have anything to protect their children from freezing to death.
So it's all very, very personal and peppered with tremendous fears.
The idea that somebody's watching all of this, I mean, all the time, 24-7, there's this big, huge blimp that everybody can see from every point in Kabul, up in the sky, taking pictures of all of Kabul.
But how many people in the United States know about the refugee camps?
Sprawling, horrid, squalid camps, people don't have water, they don't have fuel, people freeze to death, the children are out being the only income earners, the income workers are the children.
And people in the United States don't know that.
What kind of intelligence is the United States being supplied?
American sniper, what a hideous thought.
Well, you know, the real tragedy is, Kathy, is that if they really gave you the access on, say, cable TV, to explain how bad it is, they would simply spin that as a reason why we have to re-invade because the job just isn't done yet, there's still bad guys left to kill, and make everything that much worse.
It's just like with Libya.
If they really told the story of how bad Libya was right now, we'd have an invasion.
Instead, they're ignoring it and letting it go to hell on its own, which is better than us helping send it there and make it worse, you know what I mean?
Well, the tendency to use people's heartstrings in terms of humanitarian concern as a reason to justify our invasions is something that's been invoked by people who know much, much better than to do that, and the crass reasons for people to do that really should be examined in every university across the United States that cooperates with the State Department and goes along with this reason to protect kind of argument.
So the education is a crucial, crucial lever, and I'm hoping that over the months to come, it seems as though President Obama is going to at least begin to give the nod to some more reasonable argumentation and practices, even though it'll be very hard for him to accomplish anything.
I'm hoping that every group that can exercise their momentum will begin to lean hard and heavy on combining the peace movement and the environmental movement working together to say we cannot afford the wars any longer.
Well, I actually disagree with that part.
I think the anti-war movement needs to be as broad-based as possible and exclude any other issue because there's so many different hot buttons for people to refuse to cooperate with each other on, but there's potential for a very broad-based coalition against empire if we reach out to the right on the costs to them.
You know, I do think that one of the great problems in terms of our environment is that the military takes all the researchers, takes the funding, takes the ingenuity, and commandeers that into military concerns, and there's nothing left over to deal with.
And they're the worst polluters on Earth, too.
Which is what we're doing to our environment.
Yeah, and they're the worst polluters on Earth, the American Pentagon.
And for me, that's the argument why all environmentalists ought to put anti-militarism first because there ain't nothing worse than polluting a country with depleted uranium.
Nobody can compare the amount of oil they burn or, you know, that kind of thing.
And the ordnance that's littered all over places like Afghanistan will also start to litter the ranches and a lot of the pristine, beautiful areas in this country.
We're so lucky right now to have as our house guests two people from South Korea, from Jeju Island, where people have every single day combined their desire to protect their beautiful island with a desire to eject the militarists who are building bases and have wrecked their coastline by creating berths where U.S. military ships outfitted with nuclear weapons would be able to dock.
So we have a lot maybe that we can find inspiration from from people in other countries.
And I can tell you going off to federal prison that I know I'll find plenty of inspiration from the women locked up in prisons who find the courage to face these hideous long sentences and still keep their wits about them.
By long sentences, I mean some over 10 and 15 years because of mandatory minimum sentencing and because of the ways in which judges have been tolerant of plea bargaining being used against women and men prisoners in this country.
Well, I sure hope that we can talk about that when you get out.
That is a whole other conversation.
I know you have a lot to say about it, but I also know that you've got to go in preparation for your coming next interview here.
Good luck to you, Kathy.
I admire you very much.
You're a very brave lady.
And I'm talking mostly about going to the war zones, but going to federal prison, too, that's no joke.
And you do this, put yourself in these situations quite deliberately in order, you know, because you care about other people so much.
And so I admire you a lot and wish you the very best of luck and all that.
Thank you, Scott.
Take care.
All right.
So that's Kathy Kelly.
She's at Voices for Creative Nonviolence.
And I guess we'll talk with her about how it went when she gets out.
Hey, all Scott here.
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