Last weekend, in Kabul, Afghan Peace Volunteer friends huddled in the back room of their simple home. With a digital camera, glimpses and sounds of their experiences were captured, as warfare erupted three blocks away. The fighting has subdued, but the video gives us a glimpse into chronic anxieties among civilians throughout Afghanistan. Later, we …
Continue reading “Afghan Screams Aren’t Heard”
In Afghanistan, the tragic Kandahar killing spree has prompted renewed talk about the proposed U.S. Afghan Strategic Partnership Agreement. At stake in these discussions is the security of Afghanistan, the U.S., and the region. Citizens in the U.S. and Afghanistan should be urgently exchanging their views or concerns about this partnership. Many are not even …
Continue reading “Will Anyone Debate the US-Afghan Strategic Partnership Agreement?”
On Valentine’s Day, opening the little cartoon on the Google page brought up a sentimental animation with Tony Bennett singing “Why can’t I free your doubtful mind and melt your cold, cold heart?” Here in Dubai, where I’m awaiting a visa to visit Afghanistan, the weather is already warm and humid. But my bags are …
Continue reading “Cold, Cold Hearts”
It looked like a scene from an opera. Massed in the doorway and second floor balconies of a quaint building in Athens, facing a magnificent view of the Parthenon, Spanish activists hung banners and flashed peace signs and proclaimed that they wouldn’t leave the building, the Embassy of Spain, until their government assured them that …
Continue reading “Start of the Season”
Last week, newly arrived in Athens as part of the U.S. Boat to Gaza project, our team of activists gathered for nonviolence training. We are here to sail to Gaza, in defiance of an Israeli naval blockade, in our ship, The Audacity of Hope. Our team and nine other ships’ crews from countries around the …
Continue reading “Staying Human: Preparing to Sail to Gaza”
On May 4, 2011, CNN World News asked whether killing Osama bin Laden was legal under international law. Other news commentaries have questioned whether it would have been both possible and advantageous to bring Osama bin Laden to trial rather than kill him. World attention has been focused, however briefly, on questions of legality regarding …
Continue reading “The Predators: Where Is Your Democracy?”
Cost of war isn’t just dollars, says Kathy Kelly
In the early 1970s, I spent two summers slinging pork loins in a Chicago meat-packing factory. Rose Packing Company paid a handful of college students $2.25 an hour to process pork. Donning combat boots, yellow rubber aprons, goggles, hairnets, and floor-length white smocks that didn’t stay white very long, we’d arrive on the factory floor. …
Continue reading “The Unseen Slaughter”
ISLAMABAD – On May 12, the day after a U.S. drone strike killed 24 people in Pakistan’s North Waziristan, two men from the area agreed to tell us their perspective as eyewitnesses of previous drone strikes. One is a journalist, Safdar Dawar, general secretary of the Tribal Union of Journalists. Journalists are operating under very …
Continue reading “Drones and Democracy”
Kathy Kelly on the daily brutality of the war on the Taliban
