To the editors:

“Lessons and Hopes in Vietnam” (New York Times, May 24, 2016) is breathtaking in its failure to articulate a single useful lesson from the ten-year US war in Vietnam, and its failure, therefore, to offer any hope that the US will behave more wisely moving forward.

Millions of us who lived through those perilous and hopeful times concluded that the US must learn to live as a nation among nations—not the self-styled “world’s last remaining super-power,” not the uber nation playing cop to the world, and not the arrogant exception to the standards all other people must live by. We hoped the US could at long last learn that war is not the answer, and that wherever the US boot (or drone) comes down, death and destruction, displacement and devastation follow. Those lessons are playing out in front of our eyes every day.

But those are not the lessons learned by Secretary of State John Kerry, senator John McCain, and former senator Bob Kerrey, each a veteran of the Vietnam war and each deeply involved in US international policy today. Their opinion piece is a stunning mishmash of misdirection and mythology, dissembling and deception.

Misdirection: The subtitle of the piece is, “Veterans see a bright future for a country with a troubled past,” and that reference is to Vietnam, not the US. The ahistorical detachment is dazzling. “Troubled past?” Troubled by an invading army willing to commit war crimes “on a day-to-day basis with the full awareness of officers at all levels of command” as Lt. John Kerry said in1971. The US needs to face its own troubled history honestly if it ever hopes to move forward in balance and harmony.

Mythology: “We must never again confuse a war with the warriors,” they write, echoing a legend long-promoted by America-first ideologues, and oft-repeated in an attempt to silence principled opposition to the next invasion, and the next. Veterans were in fact the heart of the largest antiwar movement in US history from 1968 onward—they still are—and peace advocates made a hard distinction then (and now) between the troops who were overwhelmingly African-American and working class, and the powerful masters of war who sent them into harm’s way from the safety of their conference rooms.

Dissembling: They write that “with sufficient effort and will, seemingly unbridgeable differences can be reconciled.” They would have us believe that what we have here, as the warden says repeatedly in “Cool Hand Luke,” is “a failure to communicate.” In reality, when the gun boats and war planes arrived, no amount of effort would resolve the fact that the Vietnamese did not want to be occupied by the US or any other foreign power.

Deception: “Our leaders need to be honest with Congress and the American people,” they write, without a nod in the direction of the ongoing creation of a massive secret surveillance state organized by the CIA and the NSA. They add that the US should “exercise humility in assuming knowledge about foreign cultures,” once again, without a word about the destruction of Afghanistan, Libya, Yemen, Syria, Pakistan, and Iraq. The resultant pain and suffering, the massive refugee crisis throughout Europe and the world, are fresh reminders that a key lesson from the Vietnam war that these former fighters ignore is that wars are a leading cause of forced global migration.

The Vietnam war included the deaths of 6000 people a week—mostly civilians, and including women and children—for ten long years. The lessons Kerry, McCain and Kerrey draw from that catastrophe are anemic at best.

William Ayers

Chicago, IL

He came to Cuba often. The last time was in February 2015, on the
occasion of the International Book Fair in which the Spanish
edition of “Who Killed Che? How the CIA Got Away with
Murder” was presented. It was the result of painstaking
research and more than ten years demanding access from relevant
authorities to official documents jealously hidden.
The work of Michael Ratner and Michael Steven Smith proved beyond
doubt that the murder of Ernesto Guevara was a war crime
committed by the US government and its Central Intelligence
Agency, a crime that does not have a statute of limitations,
although the authors are on the loose in Miami and flaunt their
cowardly misdeed.

We met again in July on the occasion of the reopening of the
Cuban Embassy in Washington. We were far from imagining that we
would not meet again. Michael Ratner looked healthy and showed
the optimism and joy that always accompanied him. On that
occasion we celebrated that the Cuban Five anti-terrorist Heroes
had returned home and also the fact that President Obama had had
no choice but to admit the failure of Washington’s
aggressive policy against Cuba.

Michael was always in solidarity with the Cuban people since as a
very young person he joined the contingents of the Venceremos
Brigade. That solidarity remained unwavering at all times. His
participation in the legal battle for the freedom of our
comrades, including the “amicus” he presented to
the Supreme Court on behalf of ten Nobel Prize winners, was
decisive.

A tireless fighter, for him no cause was alien. He stood always
on the side of the victims and faced with courage, even at the
risk of his life, the oppressors who dominated that judicial
system. He also did it with rigor, integrity and love. More than
a brilliant legal professional, he was a passionate fighter for
justice.He was present in 1968 at the Columbia University strike
before completing his studies, and fought racial discrimination
together with the NAACP. Soon after graduating he represented the
victims of the brutal repression at the Attica prison. Thus he
began a remarkable career –impossible to describe in just
one article– which knew no borders: Nicaragua, Haiti,
Guatemala, Palestine, a never ending list.

When nobody did, he undertook the defense of the hostages in the
illegal naval base in Guantanamo. He convened more than 500
lawyers to do so –also for free– and achieved an
unprecedented legal victory with a decision by the Supreme Court
recognizing the rights of the prisoners.

Many other cases absorbed his time and energy, working in a team,
without necessarily appearing in the foreground. He did not
hesitate, however, to legally prosecute powerful characters like
Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush whose
“impeachment” he tried very hard to obtain.

He also accused Nelson Rockefeller, when he was governor, and
more recently Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. He published
books and essays in favor of legality and human rights. He was
considered one of the best American lawyers and chaired the
National Lawyers Guild and the Center for Constitutional Rights
and founded Palestine Rights. He combined his work as a litigator
with university teaching at Columbia and Yale and helped train
future jurists able to follow his example.

He was the main defender of Julian Assange and Wikileaks in the
United States. An insuperable paradigm of a generation that aimed
for the stars, he was an inseparable part of all their battles
and will remain so until victory always.

Mariame Kaba is moving from Chicago to New York. We will miss and remember you, and we will continue to rise up in your spirit:

https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.1790234517879591.1073741863.1729022184000825&type=1&l=37aae2b190

The Priest Who Practiced Radical Direct Action: Father Daniel J. Berrigan

May 12, 2016

By Bernardine Dohrn

Father Daniel Berrigan. Photo credit: Flickr user Jim Forest

In 1970, we received a “Letter from the Underground” from Father Daniel Berrigan, printed in the New York Review of Books. It was a note from a comrade, for Dan too was a “most wanted” fugitive from the FBI and federal law enforcement officials at that time. A Jesuit priest, an acclaimed poet, a committed anti-war activist, his “Letter” was delivered, as was much communication then, not by mail or (landline) telephone, but via the media.

Father Dan wrote that “Outlawry is the normal condition in which decent men and women are called upon to live today.” Dan and his brother, Father Philip Berrigan, and Mary Moylan, were three of the Catonsville Nine activists who broke into a local draft board office in Maryland in 1968, and then carried paper draft files out into the parking lot where they set them on fire with homemade napalm. Their federal trial was an appeal to higher law, God’s law, and Nuremberg responsibility. The defendants were found guilty of destruction of US property, destruction of Selective Service files, and interfering with the Selective Service Act of 1967.  They were sentenced to a total of eighteen years in prison, Father Dan to three years.

Dan Berrigan refused to report to prison, and during his time “underground” he repeatedly appeared publically to conduct church sermons or to give anti-war speeches, further infuriating FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover. His was both a playful “underground” and a passionately moral one. He wrote, of the Catonsville action: “Our apologies, good friends, for the fracture of good order, the burning of paper instead of children…”

The Weather Underground responded with a much less eloquent “communiqué” to “Brother Dan,” just after he was arrested in 1970. “We watched you, Dan, on TV when they took you to jail, smiling and with hands raised, handcuffed, giving the sign of peace. You have refused the corruption of your generation.”

Mary Moylan would pursue her own path as a fugitive, joining the women of the WUO for a brief period. Phil Berrigan served six years in federal prison, often in solitary confinement; Dan served a year and a half. Their courageous direct actions against the Vietnam War became a catalyst for lay Catholic activism against the military draft and the machinery of war that mushroomed to include some twenty draft board break-ins across the country, and the 1971 “burglary” of an FBI office in Media, Pennsylvania. This creative, bold activism against US military aggression, powerfully told in the documentary Hit and Stay: A History of Faith and Resistance (by Joe Tropea and Skizz Cyzyk), took place during an era when the Catholic Archbishops of New York City, Cardinal Francis Spellman and Cardinal Terence Cooke, were vehement anti-communists and outspoken champions of the Vietnam War.

Like many, Dan Berrigan did not stop with the dramatic defeat of the US military in Vietnam. Father Dan and most of his early cohorts accelerated and refined their radical, non-violent, very direct action, anti-war activism. In tandem with the yeasty Catholic activism of Central and Latin American liberation theology, the Berrigans and the vibrant US Catholic peace movement began to focus on abolishing nuclear weapons and forged the Ploughshares Movement.

In 1980, the Berrigan brothers and six friends broke into the memorably named King of Prussia, Pennsylvania nuclear missile factory owned by General Electric and took ball-peen hammers to the warhead cones. The militants poured their own blood over the war materials and then waited for the police to arrive. This time, the legal battle raged over a decade, and Father Berrigan served some twenty-three months, including time in detention awaiting trial. In total, Dan Berrigan spent seven years incarcerated for his direct action activism against U.S. wars. The wars he opposed themselves amount to a litany of carnage, war crimes, and the human agony of permanent war: Vietnam, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Iraq, the former Yugoslavia, Palestine (after visiting the Middle East, he accused Israel of “militarism” and the “domestic repression” of Palestinians), Afghanistan, Guantánamo torture, and CIA drone attacks. He has been a consistent opponent of all forms of social inequality in the US—and of the tyranny of his own Jesuit order.

“No modern war can be just, because it’s indiscriminate and because it’s launched against the people and the world…Man is at war with the global ecosystem and with his fellow man, and I denounce it.” 

Dan Berrigan extended and made contemporary the fervor of Dorothy Day, the Catholic Worker movement, liberation theology, and the Christian anarchist movement. His art, his intellectual depth, his training could not predict his lifelong practice of refusing to let his life be a mockery of his values. He acted with his teams, and with imagination and focus. He was willing, even insistent, on taking the consequences of his defiant and illegal actions. He remained an active rebel within his Jesuit order and his church, and within his own country, challenging its ongoing, rapacious addiction to warfare.

Father Dan, Presente. 

 

About the Author 

Bernardine Dohrn, activist, academic, international child rights and women’s advocate, is retired Clinical Associate Professor at Northwestern University School of Law, and founding director of the Children and Family Justice Center for twenty-four years. Dohrn is an author/co-editor of three books: Race Course: Against White Supremacy; A Century of Juvenile Justice;Zero Tolerance:  Resisting the Drive for Punishment in Our Schools. Dohrn was a Lecturer at the University of Chicago (where she graduated from the College and Law School) and is visiting professor, Leiden University faculty of law, the Netherlands.

Children are still being held in isolation in detention and correctional facilities across the United States.  Children can be found curled up on cement floors in bare cells for 22 hours a day, and for days at a time.  In order to use bathroom facilities in Los Angeles County Jail, young people must bang on their cell door and hope that someone comes to escort them to a bathroom.

This week, Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors unanimously approved a measure placing broad restrictions on the use of solitary confinement for youth confined in detention pending trial.  The plan allows authorities to use juvenile solitary confinement only for brief “cooling off periods” and only after consultation with a mental health professional.  Under the new law, children confined in Los Angeles County – a system which includes three juvenile halls and 13 juvenile camps that together hold some 1,200 young inmates who are being held in isolation in Los Angeles alone – can be placed in solitary confinement, even for short periods, “only as a temporary response to behavior that poses a serious and immediate risk of physical harm to any person. “

New York City agreed to prohibit the use of solitary confinement for prisoners up to 21 years of age, in 2015.  And in Illinois, child rights’ advocates are supporting a modest bill in the legislature that would begin to restrict the use of solitary confinement for incarcerated youth.

More than a dozen states in the federal US have banned the practice entirely in recent years.  President Obama issued a federal prohibition on solitary confinement of youth in adult federal prisons, a largely symbolic move, since the population of juveniles in federal prisons is quite small.

Studies confirm that being isolated in a small cell can have particularly negative effects on the developing brains of adolescents, and may even increase recidivism.  A comprehensive report on juvenile isolation, Growing Up Locked Down, by Ian M. Kyssel was jointly released by Human Rights Watch and the American Civil Liberties Union in 2012.

These significant small steps indicate a general move towards the abolition of the practice of solitary confinement that the U.N. Special Rapporteur on Torture, Juan E. Mendez, has called “torture, and other cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment” in his report of May 2015.  In this report, Mr. Mendez refers to torture and children deprived of their liberty and recommends in absolute terms:  “to prohibit solitary confinement of any duration and for any purpose;” (para. 86(d). Report of the Special Rapporteur on Torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment, 5 March, 2015, Human Rights Council, The Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC), particularly article 37(a) provides:  No child shall be subjected to torture or other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.  CRC General Comment No. 10 provides further support for abolishing solitary confinement of children.

There are today both conservative and liberal sponsors of legislation for ending the solitary confinement of juveniles in the U.S.  The brutal story of Khalif Browden mobilized much of this bi-partisan support.  At the age of sixteen, Khalif was confined at Rikers Island jail in New York City.  He spent three years at Rikers, without a trial.  Two of those three years were spent in solitary confinement.  Ultimately, his case was dismissed, but Khalif committed suicide when he was released.

By my long time comrade Eleanor Stein

In Spring 1968, I was completing my first year at Columbia Law School with my brilliant cohorts Gus Reichbach, Michael and Bruce Ratner, Margie Leinsdorf (later Ratner), Barry Willdorf.  Despite my upbringing by Annie and Arthur Stein, former Communists, union organizers and anti-racist activists and my teenage organizing with student CORE and SANE in New York City, I was determined to get law school under my belt and begin to practice law.  But the first day that SDS and African-American students led a march off campus to Morningside Park to protest the construction of a gym for students, Gus and I slipped out of the back row of contracts class and brought up the rear.  When students decided to sit-in at Hamilton Hall, and then to take other buildings as the African-American students instructed the white students to leave them in possession, I joined in.  Nevertheless, I was holding on to my privilege as a lawyer-in-training, and wore an armband marking me as slightly apart from the rebels: Legal Observer.  Years later, I met a then-medical student who confirmed he, too, wore a protective armband: Medical Presence.

But after a week living in Fayerweather, those distinctions had worn thin.  I was one of five law students arrested on April 30.  We had one room in Fayerweather for non-violent resisters, and I locked arms with Gus and my husband Jonah Raskin.  We were all dragged out by the police; I still have the scars on my knees to prove it.

Context is all: 1968 was the year of unparalleled revolution rivaling 1848 in its breadth. French workers and students allied and were liberating factories, to proclaim a general strike in May.  It was also the year that more than 536,000 American military personnel served in Vietnam, with more than 14,500 Americans killed in combat.  We were then and continued to be consumed by the cost of unjust war and compelled to action to stop it. 

In January 30, 1968 in the Tet Offensive and general uprising, North Vietnamese and National Liberation Front (NLF) forces attacked more than one hundred cities, with over thirty uprisings in provincial capitals.  Most dramatically, to us, NLF forces temporarily occupied the U.S. embassy in Saigon.  In early February African-American students at South Carolina State College in Orangeburg demonstrated, police opened fire killing three and wounding 33.  On March 19 a Howard University sit-in morphed into a campus building takeover and on the last day of March, LBJ announced that he was not going to run for reelection and we danced in the streets and on the campus.

But on April 4 Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King was assassinated in Memphis, where he had gone to support the city’s striking sanitation workers.  In 125 cities across the country people took to the streets and were met with tanks in Chicago Baltimore, Cincinnati and Washington, D.C.  Seventy thousand troops were called out and in Washington machine guns were mounted on the Capitol balcony and the White House lawn as fires blossomed.  Forty-six people were killed.  In the midst of mayhem, Oakland police shot and killed 16-year old Black Panther Bobby Hutton.

Only in revisiting that global context does the logic of the Columbia occupation and strike emerge.  We were driven by the exigency of throwing ourselves at the war machine and of standing side by side with African-Americans combating racism.  And that is what we did.

Retrospective cynicism is cheap: one action, no matter how dramatic, seldom results in fundamental societal change.  The university prevailed, the war bled on for another seven years.  The gym was never built but Columbia expanded throughout Harlem.

What did we accomplish? The meaning of the Sixties remains contested ground, with a strong establishment interest in dismissing the whole project as a kid’s game that threatened the city with violence and accomplished nothing.

Columbia sparked countless student protests and takeovers all over the country and symbolized the fact that privileged young people were rejecting their inheritance of war and racism and taking a stand. Make no mistake, that shook the ruling class.  And at a 2008 reunion of hundreds of participants, it was striking that 40 years on, almost all had remained in helping professions, community organizations, and advocacy.

The successful fight against the construction of a gym for Columbia students in one of the few green spaces in Harlem stands as an early victory for what is now termed environmental justice:  the fight for equitable distribution of the burdens on and benefits of the environment.

Was Columbia purely symbolic or was it a real radical movement?  The phrase “only symbolic” misses the fact that symbolism is an enormously important, motivating, inspiring and enraging aspect of human existence and life.

Demonstrators lying down in front of a troop train in Oakland was a symbolic action. They were not going to stop the transport of draftees to the Vietname front.  Yet they may die and they will certainly get arrested. And yet, what a powerful symbol: I will give my life to stop this war or to delay this war for four hours, delay the delivery of troops going – likely to their death or severe injury – to kill Vietnamese people in my name. People who immolated themselves, people who marched across the bridge in Selma. Each of these actions are the iconic images of that period. And yet each one of those actions could be characterized as purely symbolic.

We didn’t have the power in 1968 to actually physically stop the gym. We didn’t have the power to actually physically remove the Institute for Defense Analysis from the campus. What did we have? We had the power to convince a sufficient number of people on that campus and even some who made the decisions at the university that these things were wrong, that they should be stopped, that they could be stopped, and that the price for not doing that was going to be extraordinarily high for the university and the city.

The ultimate symbolism of Columbia for me was the incomparable sight of five red flags, flying from the roofs of the five occupied buildings.  That memory stirs me to this day.  Even though I wrote, in a contemporaneous account of the takeover, that I realized that

“we can’t run a socialist communal university in a capitalist city and society”, the events at Columbia remain a marker in my life.  I went into Fayerweather as a Legal Observer; I was dragged out by the police as a woman determined to transform my life and to throw my body and my spirit at the oppressors.  I soon left the law school, my marriage ended, I left New York and threw my lot in with the underground.  But that’s another story altogether.

But for me, to participate in an act of liberation at the age of 24, was a gift.  Seamus Heaney says it best:

History says, don’t hope

On this side of the grave.

But then, once in a lifetime

The longed-for tidal wave

Of justice can rise up,

And hope and history rhyme.

Seamus Heaney, The Cure at Troy