The Power of One: Photography & Activism

So, I made it up to the Benham Gallery’s The Power of One photography exhibit our local Amnesty International group is involved with in the Northwest Rooms of Seattle Center on Friday night, for an early look before it’s run as part of Bumpershoot. It was an inspiring, and at times heart wrenching, display.

Included were photos from Phil Borges latest book, Women Empowered: Inspiring Change in the Emerging World.  Borges partnered with CARE “to bring attention to the necessity of empowering women in the global campaign to alleviate poverty.” He profiled courageous women, including a teacher who continued teaching girls in secret in Afghanistan during the Taliban rule; a young woman from Ethiopia who not only refused female circumcision herself, but ended it in her community by video taping a circumcision and showing it to the male leaders who had never actually seen the procedure at the time and were horrified, voting 15 to 2 a couple weeks later to end female circumcision in their village; and a woman from Bangladesh sold into a brothel by her aunt at age 13, fighting for the rights of her fellow sex workers.

Jackie Renn’s exhibit, Portraits of Conscience: Celebrating the First Amendment During a Time of War 2002–2007 included both photos of Seattle’s protests of our current war and video interviews of conscientious objectors from WW II to the Iraq War.

Nina Berman’s photos, Purple Hearts: Back from Iraq & Marine’s Wedding were very compelling and disturbing.  All photos of young men (and at least one woman) who served in our military and came back from the Iraq severely injured, some with faces disfigured, others missing limbs. We hear all about the “surge” and how the war in Iraq is all right again now from the Republicans, but at what cost, even to our own soldiers? 

The photos of the Marine’s wedding, in a separate alcove (with a video of soldiers/veterans talking about the war) were especially haunting, with a wedding photo of the disfigured groom and his scared bride.  I picked up a flyer that told how former Marine Sgt. Ty Ziegel had been seriously injured in by a suicide car bomber in 2004 in Iraq and how his family and his fiancee Renee Kline supported him during his recovery. They asked anyone who wants to help to send donations to Fisher House, an organization which aids military families including Ty’s.

I saw a couple of Katharina Mouratidi’s photos, The Other Globalisation inside at the entrance to the main exhibit in the Olympic room.  When I left (or thought I had left) the Power of One exhibit, I discovered there were a lot more of the globalization photos outside, at the other end of the Northwest Rooms (and that people are likely to be seeing a lot just roaming around Bumpershoot between music).  Mouratidi has photographed those fighting for the rights of people and the planet against the corporate dominated, “race to the bottom” globalization, including photos of people like Rigoberta Menchú , José Bové and others not so famous.

An amazing exhibit.  As the card at the entrance noted: “Power of One was created to inspire and empower our inner-hero” (emphasis from original). 

Here locally in Seattle, our next Amnesty International meeting is coming up Tuesday, September 2 (6:30pm at the Mosaic Coffee House). Our featured speaker will be Kathleen Morris of the Washington Anti-Trafficking Response Network and the Anti-Trafficking Program Manager at the International Rescue Committee.

More information on our meeting, including directions to the Mosaic at:

http://www.scn.org/amnesty/current.html

If you don’t live in Seattle, consider finding a local or student group near you or taking action online at either Amnesty International or Amnesty International USA (or your country’s section).  I’ve also included an rss feed of AI’s most recent Urgent Actions right beneath the calendar on the left of this blog, as well as a feed for the most recent AI press releases.

Or consider one of the multitude of other activist or humanitarian groups, even if all you have time or money to do is write a suggested letter or e-mail action online every now and then or donate a few dollars.  It all adds up.  You do have the power.

Tags: The+Power+of+One, Bumpershoot, Benham+Gallery, art, photography, Phil+Borges, Jackie+Renn, Nina+Berman, globalization, Katharina+Mouratidi

Privatization Endangering Our Troops in Iraq

Our troops are in danger and several have already died from shoddy electrical work by privatized contractors in Iraq according to an article in yesterday’s New York Times.

Over 283 electrical fires that destroyed or damaged American military facilities were reported in just a 6 month period from August 2006 – January 2007, including the military’s largest dining hall in the country, according to Times research. The article said the Pentagon has reported that 13 Americans have been electrocuted and many more injured.

Electrical problems were the most urgent noncombat safety hazard for soldiers in Iraq, according to an Army survey issued in February 2007. It noted “a safety threat theaterwide created by the poor-quality electrical fixtures procured and installed, sometimes incorrectly, thus resulting in a significant number of fires.”

 A Green Beret Staff Sergeant, Ryan D. Maseth, was electrocuted in January while showering due to poor electrical grounding.  Two soldiers in a nearby building had narrowly escaped an electrical fire caused by faulty wiring just two weeks before Sgt. Maseth’s death.

KBR, the Houston-based company responsible for providing electrical and other basic services for American troops in Iraq, claim they have found no link between their work and the electrocutions, even though their own study found a “systematic problem” with their electrical work. Pentagon officials who have been pressured into looking into Sgt. Maseth’s electrocution are also trying to deny the widespread danger from faulty wiring on Iraq bases have anything to do with his death.

Yet:

In another internal document written after Sergeant Maseth’s death, a senior Army officer in Baghdad warned that soldiers had to be moved immediately from several buildings because of electrical risks. In a memo asking for emergency repairs at three buildings, the official warned of a “clear and present danger,” adding, “Exposed wiring, ungrounded distribution panels and inappropriate lighting fixtures render these facilities uninhabitable and unsafe.”

The memo added that “over the course of several months, electrical fires and shorts have compounded these unsafe conditions.”

According to the New York Times article, since the invasion of Iraq in 2003 KBR and other contractors have been paid millions to repair and upgrade the Iraqi buildings our troops are housed in.

Millions of dollars, yet lame excuses as to why the work could not be done correctly:

Officials say the administration contracted out so much work in Iraq that companies like KBR were simply overwhelmed by the scale of the operations. Some of the electrical work, for example, was turned over to subcontractors, some of which hired unskilled Iraqis who were paid only a few dollars a day.

Government officials responsible for contract oversight, meanwhile, were also unable to keep up, so that unsafe electrical work was not challenged by government auditors.

Oops, our subcontractors hired unskilled labors for a few bucks a day!  Oops, the government inspectors couldn’t keep up with checking the work! 

Now, I’m just trying to imagine if we had similar problems with widespread faulty wiring with a number of new condos going up here in Seattle.  Residents getting routinely shocked, and occasionally electrocuted in their showers, or forced to flee while their unit is destroyed in a fire.  Then the condo builders claimed, “Oops, our subcontractors hired unskilled laborers for dollars a day, not our fault!”  I also try to imagine our city officials saying, “Oops, there are just too many condos going up and our inspectors just don’t have time to inspect all of them!”  Of course, the next thing I imagine is the lawsuits against both the contractors and the city.  I’m not sure if our military members can sue (I seem to recall hearing about restrictions), though if not, why not?

Meanwhile, our troops are still  in danger:

The Army documents cite a number of recent safety threats. One report showed that during a four-day period in late February, soldiers at a Baghdad compound reported being shocked while taking showers in different buildings. The circumstances appear similar to those that led to Sergeant Maseth’s death.

Another entry from early March stated that an entire house used by American troops was electrically charged, making it unlivable.

Of course, I’m opposed to the war, and already cynical about the Bush administration and their cronies.  Still, this is shocking (oops, pun not intended, but maybe appropriate) even by their standards. 

Even if you support the war and Bush, write him and your members of congress and demand both that they remedy the situation so our troops are not in danger from our own contractors shoddy wiring, and that KBR and the other contractors be held responsible.

 Update:  I’ve found a video, of the Senate Hearings on July 11, 2008 after posting this earlier today.  Testifying at the hearing are Sgt. Maseth’s mother and the mother of another electroctuted soldier, and two electricians from KBR.

Evidently I can’t post Brightcove videos to my free Word Press account like I can YouTube videos, so follow the link below:

http://link.brightcove.com/services/player/bcpid1417423198?bctid=1662507268

Tags: Iraq+War, privatization, KBR, Bush+administration

Seattle’s Winter Soldier Hearings

What struck me most about the testimony I heard last week’s Winter Soldier hearing at Town Hall was not so much that I’ve heard it before, but the sinking feeling of hearing it all again, with a younger generation of vets. 

I found it much more disturbing, and was surprised by that (and I actually missed much of the testimony, running late because my health was acting up again).  I think maybe it was the rawness of seeing young veterans and soldiers just back, talking about what’s still going on. 

Real Change published a good article on the hearings this week.  One of the young men describes how what was supposed to be a humanitarian mission of his first tour turned out to be mostly about harassing people.  Then shortly into his second deployment, a roadside bomb killed several officers in his platoon, and “the rules of engagement changed from disarming civilians to killing them.”

“Pretty much all we did was just go out on the town and search for people to shoot,” Kochergin said. “Later on, we had no rules of engagement at all. It was go out there and if you see something that you think is not right, take ‘em out.”

Another veteran described how “American soldiers rip Iraqi men from their homes and families, often based on a tip from a neighbor seeking a payoff from the U.S. military.”  Now think about that.  Imagine what it would be like if someone who didn’t like you could not only turn you in and have you put in detention and tortured, but could also get paid for it.

• Joshua Simpson: “People know that the U.S. has a military that will pay for people to give information to us, [but it’s] the names of people [that] don’t have anything to do with terrorist attacks or the insurgency. It’s people they dislike or something, a neighbor who had a feud with them – sometimes just random people. And this would be the basis of the raids that we would do.”

Nor are our troops or their families immune from the damage of this war:

About a third of those returning suffer from either PTSD or major depression, he said, with up to 20 percent struggling with the loss of function from a traumatic brain injury brought on by constant exposure to blasts in Iraq. At that rate, out of the 1.6 million military personnel deployed to Iraq, Kanter estimated a total of 300,000 to 400,000 “psychiatric casualties” will be coming home, out of which 18 veterans a day are already committing suicide – the highest rate ever recorded, he said.

The result for families, said Tracy Manzel, who spoke on the panel with her husband Seth, is domestic violence, broken marriages and, in one case she cited, a wife murdered by a husband in Seth’s unit. “The Bush Administration talks of family values and how much these values are attacked, but really what the administration is doing is splitting families apart,” she said.

Racism is, sadly, not dead in the U.S. military, as reported in the Seattle PI article on the hearings:

Many said they went to Iraq hoping to help civilians, but found that often wasn’t the case. U.S. troops frequently referred to all Iraqis and Middle Easterners as “hajji,” an ethnic slur. In medical units, they became “range balls,” meaning they were like the golf balls hit on driving ranges that are of low value and that you don’t mind losing.

Sexism isn’t either.  One of the people who testified at the hearing was the mother of a young woman still in Iraq (though it sounds like, at least, with a different unit now) who suffered from “command rape.”  It’s so common, there’s a name for it.  Her daughter told her that the prevalent attitude in the military is that women in uniform are all either “bitches, dykes or whores.,” and didn’t know what to do. 

There was a second panel on GI resistance (which is sprouting up, just as it did during the Vietnam War), including a film from those who have fled to Canada.

After the hearing, we all marched, down from Town Hall to Westlake, via Pike Place Market.  I just wished there were more of us, more of us marching.  There actually are more people against the war than when we held the biggest marches before it happened (I was remembering Seattle Center packed at the start of one of them as I walked through the grounds the other day).

 

 

 

Tags: Winter+Soldier, IVAW, Iraq+War, Veterans+for+Peace, Seattle

End the War Rally

I was running late for the peace rally Saturday and missed the first rally before the march.   My timing was good for the march itself, however.  It was less than a block away and moving toward us as they rerouted the bus around the corner.  So, once I got off, I got my camera out, and after fumbling through changing my batteries when I didn’t have to (it was in display mode), got some great pictures. 

Well, maybe not so great (this is me), but, a lot of them!

One good video from the camera as well, if I can ever figure out how to convert and upload it again. . .

I got caught up with the energy, which was really inspiring.  It has been hard to maintain the momentum as this war drags on and the will of the people is ignored (whether the massive crowds at the start, in spite of the neo-cons trying to invoke Sept. 11 and claim anti-patriotism; or the overwhelming majority agains the war now).  Unfortunately, hard as well to maintain the momentum with our fractured peace movement.

Yet, there everyone was; and many from far away (while I wish there were more Seattlites out).  Kitsap, Bellingham, and, oh, yes, Portland! 

I started seeing familiar faces in the crowd.  Wait is that. . .?  It’s been a little over a decade, but recognition is dawning. . . (and it was the same for them, with me).  First a familiar face, other than George Hickey taking pictures (not that it isn’t good to see George).  Yes, with a good camera (now gone digital, though I’ll bet George is still a holdout) and wearing a green army shirt.  No, yes, that really has to be – Mike Hastie (from the Northwest Veterans for Peace in Portland)!

Lost sight of him in the crowd while taking my own pictures.  Then turning a corner, I see a white haired gentleman in a NW Veterans for Peace t-shirt and filming the march with  said, “Hey!”  No flicker of recognition (from either of us), and I was thinking this must be a more recent member, since I’ve been gone.  So I continue on. . .

I’m taking some photos of the Portland contingent when I see Mike again.  I tap him on the shoulder.  He looks real confused (“Who is this lady?”), then recognition, a big smile, and a hug.  We talk a bit, then split up and go back to taking pictures, planning to look for each other after the march.

So I’m at the rally at the end of the march, in Occidental Park in Pioneer Square, and I see the guy in the NW Vets for Peace shirt again.  I keep looking at him. . .  wait a minute, it’s Don Mills. . .  He looks at me, slightly puzzled. . . then sees it’s me!  Don’s up here with Carolyn (of course), and Ted Kiser.  So we find them and have a little reunion.  Great to see them!  Funny thing is, of all the people up from Portland, I don’t think I’ve seen any of them since I left (either up here at WTO etc., or my rare trips back to PDX).

They leave to head back to Portland.  I move closer to check out the rally, remembering I want to keep an eye open for Mike. 

We have someone speaking out for immigrant rights (Si, se peude!  Still echoes of Magdaleno, now rabble rousing in Miami.)  We’re surrounded by puppets – a grieving Iraqi mother, a man who wants to know why the U.S. is so afraid of the International Criminal Court, and, oh, yes, the Bush chain gang who were marching with us earlier (Bush, Cheney, Condi and Rummy).

Coming up next, the Bush bunch are on trial for their crimes against humanity.  Charges are read.  Congress is implicated, too – for inaction. They are found guilty and led away in chains. 

Now, the disturbing thing to me is that some people were yelling, “Torture them!” during the trial.  While I know it was the Bushies themselves who brought the whole subject of torture out in the open and have been trying to make it acceptable (while using Orwellian language to claim it isn’t really torture), it still troubles me.  I don’t expect to hear it from “our side”.  I like to think “we” are better (like I liked to think the U.S. was better, or at least our people, as we didn’t openly torture before this, and our government’s complicity with those who did was kept secret). 

That’s the trouble though.  Once the concept is out there, and discussion (and use) of it is considered to be possibly acceptable, even some of those on the other side of the debate can start to think, “Hey, let’s torture the torturers!”  Come to think of it, the whole concept behind capitol punishment. 

What I like about Amnesty International is that they have always been consisantly agains torture, and other human rights violations — in all cases.  No excuses being made for one side or the other.  Before yesterday, I thought we were mostly “preaching to the choir” in speaking out against torture in Seattle, as most people here are liberal, and “know better”.  Now, I think, maybe the choir needs preaching too, to.

Hungry Mob, a hip hop band from Portland came up to wind up the rally.  I was wandering around, wondering whether to head off, when I saw the AFSC banner at the edge of the square.  Then, the boots.  Rows of them.  Some with flowers.  Many with photos.

I took a lot of pictures.  I ran into Mike again, taking photos as well.  Then, I thought I’d go around to the backside of the display and take some more.  First I saw there were rows of names and dates on what looked like Tibetan prayer flags. Then I realized there were more shoes here as well, pouring out of bags.  Shoes to represent the Iraqi dead, which, of course, includes children.  Mike lined up a shot including the sign reading “1 shoe represents 3000 Iraqi deaths” over a bag of shoes, with the moving posters of a grieving Iraqi woman, and a smiling Iraqi girl, behind.

The cost of war.  A cost that’s been going on so long in Iraq.  I met Mike and our other Veterans for Peace buddies in Portland protesting the Gulf War. A war started by Bush I against a dictator his administration used to support, while Saddam was gassing and committing other human rights violations against his own people.  After the Gulf War, where we had destroyed the Iraqi infrastructure (water, sewer, electricty. . .), we continued to let their children starve to death as a tactic of war.  When pointed out, well, that was Saddam’s fault.  Really, we could enforce two “no fly” zones, but couldn’t make sure the food got to the children?  Why does a whole country have to suffer for one man?  Who’s gone now?  Now the country is so bitterly divided (Iraq, though to some extent the U.S.), there is little hope.  Having us stay as the occupier is doing nothing but cause yet more deaths.  Now Bush wants war with Iran and God knows who else.

Mike was in earnest discussion with an Iraq War veteran before I left.  The baton of leadership being passed on in a way to the next generation; the one who can speak fully to the truth of this war.

How many more generations does this need to go on?

 

  

Tags: peace, Iraq+War, Veterans+for+Peace