by Kathy Kelly
May 12, 2004

“Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.”
-Arundhati Roy
Porto Alegre, Brazil, World Social Forum, January 27, 2003

“Kathleen Kelly, report to Admin.” I was routinely cleaning toilets in my dorm at Pekin Federal Prison Camp when the loudspeaker summoned me to the Administration Building. “You’re going next door,” said the guard on duty. “Someone wants to talk with you.” During a five minute ride to the adjacent medium-security men’s prison, I quickly organized some thoughts about civil disobedience and prison terms, expecting to meet a journalist. Instead, two well-dressed men stood to greet me and then flashed their FBI badges. They had driven to Pekin, IL from Chicago, where they work for the FBI’s National Security Service.

Both men were congenial. They assured me that their visit had nothing to do with Voices in the Wilderness violations of federal law in numerous trips to Iraq, where we regularly delivered medicines and medical relief supplies. Nor had they come to talk about why I’m currently imprisoned for protesting the US Army’s military combat training school in Fort Benning, GA. What they proposed was “a conversation,” since they had information which they felt would help me and Voices teams in Iraq, both now and in the future. Likewise, I could help them, and perhaps improve national security, by answering some of their questions.

I said I’d prefer not to talk with them without a lawyer present. The more talkative agent quickly nodded and suggested a follow-up visit with a lawyer. He spoke further about his favorable impressions of Voices in the Wilderness and how useful it would be for our travelers to better understand some of the people whom the Iraqi government, under Saddam Hussein, had assigned to work with us as “minders” during our past trips. He said he had information about “bad things” they had done or had planned to do. Having this conversation would benefit Voices in its travel to other countries as well. (Voices has focused solely on Iraq, although some of us have visited other countries with other groups).

At that point, I decided not to talk with them at all. “I don’t want to accuse either of you of any wrongdoing,” I said, wanting to be polite, “but your organization has used methods that I don’t support, and sometimes your job requires you to lie.”

Like people around the world, Voices in the Wilderness is outraged by the systematic torture and humiliation - indeed the murder — of Iraqi detainees. This is true not only at Abu Ghraib, the Baghdad prison infamous under Saddam Hussein for the cruel treatment and execution of political prisoners, but elsewhere among US-run prisons in Iraq.

Our outrage is multiplied by the knowledge that this is not, as George Bush portrays it, the work of six or seven delinquent soldiers. This depiction is the strategy of an administration on the run, both from the political fallout of this scandal, and from the intractable resistance in Iraq to the American occupation. Torture becomes necessary where invaders encounter broad resistance and seem totally ignorant about the structure of that resistance and the nature of the local civil society.

George Bush would have us believe that the vileness at Abu Ghraib is an isolated instance of treachery, a regrettable aberration in an otherwise humane system. No; the abuse of Iraqi detainees, directed by US military intelligence and unopposed by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, is part of US strategy in Iraq. It is consistent with the US military’s disregard for the Geneva Conventions in Iraq and with the Bush administration’s disregard for international law. Worse, it is characteristic of an historic pattern of abuse practiced by the US military as an instrument of foreign policy.