The Life of Brian

"Monty Python’s Life of Brian” is a 1979 British comedy film starring and written by the comedy group known as Monty Python. The film contains themes of religious satire that were controversial at the time of its release, and onward, drawing accusations of blasphemy and protests from some religious groups.

Some of you, no doubt, have seen the movie, and I don’t particularly recommend it to those of you who haven’t. But I do remember it as being quite interesting—and quite funny in places.

This article, though, is about the life of a different Brian, one much closer to (my) home than Great Britain. In fact, the man about whom I am writing lives only 15 miles from my home town in northwest Missouri.

Brian Terrell and his wife Betsy Keenan live and work at Strangers and Guests Catholic Worker Farm in Maloy, Iowa. They raise most of what they need from their gardens, chickens and small herd of goats.

From this little farm, Brian travels around Iowa and across the U.S.—and even overseas—speaking and acting with various communities as a peace activist and a co-coordinator of Voices for Creative Nonviolence.

This month Brian, who will turn 58 next month, has been on another lengthy protest march. This one was called “On the Road to Ground the Drones.”

Brian and those with him walked about 165 miles from the Boeing corporate headquarters in Chicago (where the manufacture of drones and conventional war planes is managed and designed) to the Michigan Air National Guard Facility at the Battle Creek Airport, planned site of a new drone command center. They arrived there on June 14.

My Nov. 25, 2012, blog article was about drones. It was not long after that that I heard about Brian for the first time. At that very time he was serving a six month sentence at the federal prison camp in Yankton, South Dakota.

Brian had been arrested and sentenced for protesting remote control murder by drones, specifically from Whiteman Air Force Base in Johnson Co., Mo. It was not long after his release that I met him for the first time.

Every year Brian and Betsy host a Summer Solstice and Feast of St. John the Baptist celebration, and I attended part of that festive time last year and met Brian there. People from various parts of the country, and even England, had come to Maloy to be with Brian and Betsy and the others who had gathered at their place.

With few exceptions, those who had come were peace activists. This year’s gathering, their 20^th, will begin around 4 p.m. on June 21, tomorrow afternoon, and I plan to be there again.

Yes, the life of Brian Terrell is quite different from that of the Brian in the Monty Python movie—and it is quite different from the way most of us live.

Most of us are not willing or able to live the Catholic worker type of lifestyle, and even fewer are willing to involve ourselves in public protests that lead to arrest and even incarceration.

But Brian keeps walking, keeps protesting, and keeps advocating for cessation of the use of drones.

Last month he wrote, “Our civilian and military authorities, proliferating drone attacks around the globe from more and more American bases, are acting recklessly and in defiance of domestic and international law.”

The main objection, of course, is to the killing of civilians as “collateral damage” of the drones.

Yes, the life Brian Terrell is living now is worth our consideration—and appreciation.

Trayvon and Abdulrahman

The name Trayvon, sadly, has become a household name in the U.S., and elsewhere. But many of you may not know the name Abdulrahman. Both young men, though, were U.S. citizens born in 1995, and both were tragically killed – but in greatly different circumstances.

Trayvon Martin, as you know, was killed at short range in February 2012 by George Zimmerman. Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, as you may not know, was killed at very long range by a U.S. drone.

Abdulrahman was born in Denver, Colo. in September 1995, nine months after Trayvon; he was killed in Yemen on Oct. 14, 2011, ten weeks before the Florida teenager was shot and killed.

The justification of Trayvon’s slaying is highly questionable, although the jury concluded that under Florida law Zimmerman was not guilty of second degree murder or manslaughter.

The killing of Abdulrahman, though, seems completely unjustified and an unmitigated tragedy. It is hard to compare justification for taking someone's life, but the killing of Abdulrahman seems much more unjust that the “self-defense” killing of Trayvon.

Abdulrahman’s father, Anwar, was also an American citizen, born in New Mexico in 1971. And he was killed by a “Hellfire missile” fired from a U. S. Predator drone just two weeks before his son.

The father was clearly linked to terrorist activity. There is no evidence at all that the son was.

Details of Abdulrahman’s tragic death are told in Jeremy Scahill’s 2013 book, “Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield.” The final chapter of that 642-page book is “Paying for the Sins of the Father” and is about Abdulrahman’s annihilation.

On June 28, I attended the opening screening of Scahill’s documentary film with the same name as the book. In it, Scahill interviews Nasser al-Awlaki, Abdulrahman’s grandfather, who is a former Fulbright scholar, university president and Yemeni public servant.

Last week the New York Times ran an article by Grandfather Nasser. It was titled “The Drone That Killed My Grandson.” I encourage you to read that article at this link.

Even though Abdulrahman’s father was involved in terrorist activities, he was an American citizen. Nevertheless, he was never charged with a crime and evidence of his criminal wrongdoing was never presented to a court.

He was just put on a kill list and “taken out” by a drone.

Still, we have been in a “war on terrorism” since 2001, and in a war you target and kill your enemies. So most Americans probably support the killing of Abdulrahman’s father.

And most Americans support continuation of the war on terrorism, according to a Fox News poll. Last month after President Obama said that the war on terrorism “must end,” 77% of the voters polled said the war on terrorism “should continue to be a top priority to the government.

But should that mean targeting and killing a 16-year-old American boy? Surely not!

In responding to questions about his killing, Robert Gibbs, a former White House press secretary, said that the boy should have had “a more responsible father.”

But maybe we need a more responsible government. And maybe there needs to be more outrage about the killing of Abdulrahman.

Many of us are against profiling and the mistreatment of young African-American men like Trayvon, as we should be.

Why shouldn’t we be even more strongly against the profiling and the killing of a young Yemeni-American man like Abdulrahman?

American Hubris

“Hubris” is defined as “excessive pride or self-confidence; arrogance.” It is a word descriptive of the attitude of many individuals as well as many groups, such as corporations or nations. Last month I happened to see (on MSNCB) a television special titled “Hubris: Selling the Iraq War.” It was a most interesting, and quite disturbing, documentary about the events leading up to the war in Iraq, which started ten years ago today, on March 19, 2003.

The TV program was largely based on the book Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal, and the Selling of the Iraq War (2006) by Michael Isikoff and David Corn, two top-notch American journalists. They were interviewed in last month’s program, which is also available on six YouTube videos.

On the day of its airing, Corn said that “the documentary goes beyond what Isikoff and I covered in Hubris, presenting new scoops and showing that the complete story of the selling of that war has yet to be told.”

In the documentary itself, Isikoff says, “There is no question the news media didn’t do its job during the run-up to the Iraq War. Far too often, the press simply accepted these sweeping assertions by the highest officials in the government, without looking for the hard evidence to support it.”

Before the Introduction in the book, the authors of Hubris begin with this quote: “How is the world ruled and how do wars start? Diplomats tell lies to journalists and then believe what they read.” (These words are from Karl Kraus, 1874-1936, an Austrian journalist and press critic.) That kind of chicanery seems to have lurked behind the starting of America’s first “preemptive” war ten years ago in Iraq.

That war officially ended on December 31, 2011. By that time nearly 4,500 U.S. troops had been killed and more than 32,000 wounded. The war cost U.S. taxpayers more than $3,000,000,000,000. Even worse, an estimated 108,000 Iraqi civilians died as a direct result of the war, and some 15,400,000 were displaced.

Those terrible results all seem to have been largely due to the hubris and erroneous judgment of the top U.S. governmental officials. What a shame for America!

Now in 2013 there are different government executives, but American hubris still seems to be “alive and well.” Last month Bill Moyers and Michael Winship wrote a significant article titled “The Hubris of the Drones.” They charge, “Our blind faith in technology combined with a false sense of infallible righteousness continues unabated.”

The authors also quote Reuters correspondent David Rohde, who recently asserted that the U.S. “administration’s covert drone program is on the wrong side of history. With each strike, Washington presents itself as an opponent of the rule of law, not a supporter. Not surprisingly, a foreign power killing people with no public discussion, or review of who died and why, promotes anger among Pakistanis, Yemenis and many others.”

And then an unnamed former senior military official is quoted: “Drone strikes are just a signal of arrogance that will boomerang against America.”

Near the end of their article, Moyers and Winship aver that American “hubris brought us to grief in Vietnam and Iraq and may do so again” with the current President’s “cold-blooded use of drones and his indifference to so-called ‘collateral damage,’ grossly referred to by some in the military as ‘bug splat,’ and otherwise known as innocent bystanders.”

Does not this nation badly need to repent of its hubris in initiating and conducting the war on Iraq and to rethink the way drones are now being used?

Droning On

Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) is the more technical name for what we commonly call a drone. The UAV or drone is, simply, an aircraft without a human pilot on board. Its flight is either controlled autonomously by computers in the vehicle, or under the remote control of a navigator or pilot, which the military calls a Combat Systems Officer.  

UAVs (drones) are of particular concern to many people (including me) at this time because they are systematically killing people in several different countries. For example, the U.S. government has made hundreds of attacks on targets in northwest Pakistan since 2004 using drones controlled by the CIA’s Special Activities Division.

There are a number of groups monitoring the use of drones in covert warlike activities. One such group is the British-based Bureau of Investigative Journalism. They report that as of this month, some 350 drone strikes in Pakistan alone have killed between 2,600 and 3,400 people, including as many as 885 civilians.

The U.S. is not the only country to have drones, of course. The Israelis used drones in their attacks on Gaza earlier this month.

UAVs are sometimes called “killer robots,” and Human Rights Watch, based in Harvard Law School, earlier this month released a 49-page document titled “Losing Humanity: The Case Against Killer Robots.” The report “calls for an absolute ban on the development, production, and use of fully autonomous weapons.” (That extensive report can be accessed here.)

The Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR) is another organization actively seeking to halt the use of drones. Last week I participated in their webinar on the subject. The first presenter was Medea Benjamin, the author of Drone Warfare: Killing by Remote Control (Kindle, 2012).

My question to Medea was, Aren’t drones preferable to “boots on the ground?” The response was similar to what the FOR has been advocating since it was founded in 1915: surely there is a better way to solve differences than by the use of drones or ground forces.

One page on FOR’s website is “Faith-based communities say no to drones.” (There is a link for signing a petition against the use of drones, which I have done.) Among the aspects of drone warfare that FOR finds particularly disturbing are these:

The Administration insists that because drones do not risk American lives, Congress need not be consulted, leading to a dangerous abuse of executive power. (This is a similar concern that Rachel Maddow writes about in Drift, the subject of my previous posting.)

The President and his aides draw up a Kill List in which they play the role of prosecutor, judge, jury and executioner. People on this secret Kill List have never been charged, tried or convicted in a court of law, and are given no opportunity to surrender. (As most of you know, I voted for President Obama’s reelection, but this is an aspect of his administration that I oppose; of course, there would likely have been similar, or even increased, use of military UAVs by a Republican administration.)

If you want to think more about this important issue, click on the links given above—or the many other websites available at your fingertips such as DronesWatch.org.

Steps need to be taken to keep this country, and others, from droning on.