By Elton Davis,
Des Moines Catholic Worker

Elton was one of the four members of the Des Moines peace movement subpoenaed by the federal government regarding their participation in a rally and nonviolent direct action the weekend of Nov. 15, 2003. The federal government dropped the subpoenas under pressure from friends of the Iowa peace movement, elected representatives and national media. Elton offers us his reflections on the experience.

It’s been almost two weeks now since this disruption entered our lives, four individuals, as well as Drake University, being subpoenaed to appear before a federal grand jury here in Des Moines. I’ve read the accounts of activists who have been targeted by the US government over the years, just never figured I was a big enough fish to warrant any attention at all to be perfectly honest;

I know the accounts of those who were active against the Nazis, those who were sent to the gulags in the Soviet Union, those who were murdered in Central America in the 1980’s, those who were targeted in the 1950’s by McCarthy, those who were targeted during the Vietnam war, and under the tenure of FBI director J. Edgar Hoover.

By Anna Bachmann
Voices in the Wilderness
Feb. 18, 2004

The elderly woman dressed all in black with tattoos on both wrinkled cheeks sat down at our feet before the rubble of her destroyed house as we tried to explain our presence. She didn’t look pleased and after awhile she got up and left. Her neighbor, a lawyer, was the spokesman for the neighborhood in a small farming village called Al Jazeerah not far from Ar-Ramadi, which is a part of the Sunni Triangle where resistance to the U.S. forces has been high. The lawyer didn’t look pleased either.

He told us that it was potentially dangerous for him. All these people have come to talk and take pictures but nothing ever changes. Nothing is ever done to make up for what they have lost. People are starting to question him. Perhaps some of the Westerners coming are spies. Who are we really? Have we come to take pictures of the men and hand them over to the U.S.? Why should they trust us at all?

In September 2002, White House correspondents chided Andrew Card, a Bush Administration publicist, for not giving a coherent rationale for US warfare against Iraq. Mr. Card responded by saying, “From a marketing point of view, you don’t introduce a new product in August” (NYT, September 7, 2002). By late September of 2002, the marketing strategies for war were rolling forth: Saddam Hussein was connected to Al Queda, part of the 9/11 attacks against the US, possessed weapons of mass destruction, and, if all other arguments failed, the US must help Iraqis by replacing Saddam’s regime with a western-style democracy. Now, as the US-led Occupation of Iraq drags on, the reasons given for going to war against Iraq have been exposed as a malicious smokescreen for the real purpose of the US attack: control of Iraq’s oil wealth and the establishment of US military bases in a geopolitically strategic area of the world.

Recently in Nashville, friends of ours have proposed an eye-catching demonstration calling for an end to the US Occupation. Characters representing President Bush and his advisors stare into a U-shaped tunnel and ask, “Do you see a light at the end of that tunnel yet?” There won’t be any light at the end of the tunnel until the US stops a dead-end occupation that has initiated rising tolls of massacre, assassination, theft, disease and impoverishment in Iraq.