05/28/15 – Kathy Kelly – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, you guys, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
It's my show, The Scott Horton Show.
Our next guest is Kathy Kelly, co-coordinator of Voices for Creative Nonviolence.
That is VCNV.org.
Welcome back to the show.
Kathy, how are you doing?
Hello, Scott.
Good to be on your show.
Thank you.
Good.
Happy to have you back now.
You just got out of the penitentiary.
How could you do it, Kathy?
Well, the military lawyer said, Ms. Kelly is in great need of rehabilitation.
Actually, I was arrested three days after I was released out at Beale Air Force Base and then took off for Afghanistan.
So, in a way, I was rehabilitated.
I think it's good to remember what it's like to be somebody living in a prison and how hard it is for the people that are trapped there.
Well, tell us about that, first of all.
Well, thank you.
You know, the prison system is so futile.
The place that I was locked up in was one that I think they've pretty much given up on.
They call it the armpit of the system.
And I don't mean to complain about conditions.
The most onerous thing is really the length of sentencing, the dreariness and the isolation, the loneliness.
Well, here I am at a house of hospitality here in New York where others use the same phone line.
Excuse that.
Anyway, the women in prison are so full of remorse because they're separated from their children.
It's a very painful place for people to be.
And, I mean, I must say for men also, the median sentence length at Pekin Prison for Men, where I was last in prison before this most recent time, the median sentence length was 27 years.
So people enter into these systems and they'll be grandparents before they emerge.
Well, in talking to the people in there, were they in there for, you know, doing horrible things to other people or just for offenses against some bureaucrat or what?
Well, the shorthand was kind of are you in for money or drugs?
And if people committed a money crime, it wasn't anything compared to what the big banksters have done in our more recent history.
And, yes, women got involved in drug trafficking and drug use.
They hurt themselves.
They hurt immediate family members.
But they were not even anywhere near posing a threat to the security for somebody like me living my ordinary life or probably you or most of your listeners.
But why does this prison industrial complex go on?
Well, you know, every year, every university across the country tends to graduate a new group of lawyers.
And how are you going to keep all of the lawyers and all the wardens and the prison guards and the prison architects and all the corporations getting close to slave labor?
How are you going to keep them all in the loop of profiting?
We have to have prisoners.
And I think that's part of the reason why we continue this so-called war on drugs, which has been so futile.
It's broken the lives of many, many people, the broken communities.
It's raised the numbers of people who have been impoverished.
And certainly it hasn't made it less likely that a new wave of drugs will come into the country with the influx of heroin.
And while we're spending so much money in Afghanistan making a war there, Afghanistan is now supplying 80 to 90 percent of the world's heroin.
So the solutions that the United States people have been asked to pay for don't work.
In fact, I was just doing a show the other day where a guy in the chat room said, Hey, I just got back from Afghanistan and my whole tour was just standing around guarding a warlord's opium poppy fields.
Isn't that incredible?
Real eye-opening tour of duty for him.
And meanwhile, I just got back from Afghanistan and I'd say my main duty was to have my shoulder available while women sobbed and sobbed and sobbed.
For many reasons.
Sorry, could I could I keep this line for a little longer?
Thank you.
You're a patient person.
Yeah, no problem.
Hey, it's live radio.
These things happen.
I don't get upset.
And and I just love talking with you anyway.
So now remind us again, this government that locks all these people up in cages for drugs, as you described.
Why do they lock you in a cage?
Well, I had thought it was appropriate to exercise my First Amendment right to assemble peaceably for redress of grievance.
Georgia Walker and I bought a loaf of bread, which is quite symbolic of the way that Afghans settle in for every meal.
There's always a big wheel of bread.
And so we bought that kind of bread to the Whiteman Air Force Base.
And we wanted to talk with the commander of the base.
We felt it was important to talk with somebody who had authority over the squadrons that were flying drones, weaponized drones over Afghanistan.
And we wanted to know how many people were killed in Afghanistan, if any, on that day.
And how do their manuals help the pilots distinguish between somebody who is an armed competent and somebody who isn't?
We wanted to ask questions about what they do when people say, we don't want to do this kind of work anymore.
And we know that they're having a very hard time filling the jobs of piloting drones.
Because many say, look, I'm traumatized.
I'm 7,000 miles away from the war zone, and I'm 18 inches away from the war zone.
So we had questions.
But the commander of the base felt that we were trespassing by being there at all.
We were arrested.
And I think the judge in my case felt that his prior responsibility was to protect the weapons and protect the base.
Whereas I think his job really is to protect our First Amendment rights, to speak up when we believe that murder and assassination are taking place.
Right.
Well, and not just believe, but know for sure.
Thank you.
Well, that's certainly true.
There are plenty of reports that have come out that are reliable, like the reprieve report that show that when U.S. officials have said, oh, the numbers of civilians killed are in the single digits.
That's just a bald-faced lie.
And you can't say it's the fog of war and they get mixed up.
I mean, these are static targets that are being hit with the desire to be precise, I suppose.
But, in fact, time and again, civilians out collecting fuel on a mountainside or riding in a convoy to go and get health care and having left early in the morning.
There's confusion.
There's uncertainty.
You know, are these people that might – Hi.
Hi.
Could I just keep this line a little longer?
Thank you.
Just a couple more minutes.
You know, if anybody ever comes to New York and wants to visit Mary House Catholic Worker, it's a wonderful spot.
I understand.
The phones are shared.
No problem.
No problem.
Anyway, the mistakes that have been made have certainly caused good reason for concern, along with the concern about proliferation.
You know, these weaponized drones aren't something that only the United States is going to be controlling.
And once upon a time, you know, the U.S. was the only one with the nuclear bomb, and look at us now.
So what kind of future are we heading into?
I suppose I maybe could mention that one of the great ironies for me is that a new way to get contraband into the prisons is through flying it in with a drone.
I read that in the New York Times.
Yeah, yeah.
I've seen a couple of things, too, along those lines.
Well, great.
So it sure is good to have you back on the show and back here to relative freedom compared to being locked in the pen.
I'm glad they didn't keep you that long in there, but I am sorry that they put you in there at all.
Although the silver lining, of course, is now you're even better informed as an anti-prison activist, too.
So we can all benefit from that.
Well, thanks.
I think that there's good reason for activists to go inside the prison system because I think we've got a war against the poor.
We've got a war against the poor going on in this country.
People in my generation couldn't help but feel a little encouraged and inspired, I think, by a war on poverty.
And we thought that there would be this reservoir of goodwill that the U.S. would create and that hunger and disease could be eradicated from our world.
And it's gone in a very opposite direction.
Well, the poor have a lot of money, too.
So it makes a lot of sense for the government to prey on them.
It's all about volume, right?
Well, it really is.
I'm glad you used that word, prey.
A fellow recently wrote a book called The Locust Defect, talking about the predatory nature of how people bully and pick on the most vulnerable people in society.
But some would conclude, well, then lock those people up.
But I think that the prisons ought to be abolished.
I'm not in favor of any prisons.
We can always find better alternatives for helping people figure out wiser ways to live their lives.
Absolutely.
All right.
Well, thank you so much.
It's great to have you back on the show.
Thank you, Scott.
I will allow you to allow these others to use the phone now.
Okay, thank you.
But I sure do appreciate your time again on the show, Kathy.
All right, Scott.
Bye-bye.
Very happy she's out of jail now.
Kathy Kelly, she's at Voices for Creative Nonviolence, VCNV.org.
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