Coming
in October
From AK Press
Today's
Stories
September
23, 2003
Yigal
Bronner
The
Truth About the Wall
Website of the Day
Bands Against Bush
September
20 / 22, 2003
Uri Avnery
The
Silliest Show in Town
Alexander
Cockburn
Lighten
Up, America!
Peter Linebaugh
On the Bicentennial of the Execution of Robert Emmet
Anne Brodsky
Return
to Afghanistan
Saul Landau
Guillermo and Me
Phan Nguyen
Mother Jones Smears Rachel Corrie
Gila Svirsky
Sharon, With Eyes Wide Open
Gary Leupp
On Apache Terrorism
Kurt Nimmo
Colin
Powell: Exploiting the Dead of Halabja
Brian
Cloughley
Colin Powell's Shame
Carol Norris
The Moral Development of George W. Bush
Bill Glahn
The Real Story Behind RIAA Propaganda
Adam Engel
An Interview with Danny Scechter, the News Dissector
Dave Lindorff
Good Morning, Vietnam!
Mark Scaramella
Contracts and Politics in Iraq
John Ross
WTO
Collapses in Cancun: Autopsy of a Fiasco Foretold
Justin Podur
Uribe's Desperate Squeals
Toni Solo
The Colombia Three: an Interview with Caitriona Ruane
Steven Sherman
Workers and Globalization
David
Vest
Masked and Anonymous: Dylan's Elegy for a Lost America
Ron Jacobs
Politics of the Hip-Hop Pimps
Poets
Basement
Krieger, Guthrie and Albert
Website of the Weekend
Ted Honderich:
Terrorism for Humanity?
September
19, 2003
Ilan Pappe
The
Hole in the Road Map
Bill Glahn
RIAA is Full of Bunk, So is the New York Times
Dave Lindorff
General Hysteria: the Clark Bandwagon
Robert Fisk
New Guard is Saddam's Old
Jeff Halper
Preparing
for a Struggle Against Israeli Apartheid
Brian J. Foley
Power to the Purse
Clare
Brandabur
Hitchens
Smears Edward Said
Website of the Day
Live from Palestine
September
18, 2003
Mona Baker
and Lawrence Davidson
In
Defense of the Boycott of Israeli Academic Institutions
Wayne
Madsen
Wesley
Clark for President? Another Neo-Con Con Job
Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
Wesley Clark and Waco
Muqtedar Khan
The Pakistan Squeeze
Dominique
de Villepin
The
Reconstruction of Iraq: This Approach is Leading Nowhere
Angus Wright
Brazilian Land Reform Offers Hope
Elaine
Cassel
Payback is Hell
Jeffrey
St. Clair
Leavitt
for EPA Head? He's Much Worse Than You Thought
Website
of the Day
ALA Responds to Ashcroft's Smear
Recent
Stories
September 17, 2003
Timothy J. Freeman
The
Terrible Truth About Iraq
St. Clair / Cockburn
A
Vain, Pompous Brown-noser:
Meet the Real Wesley Clark
Terry Lodge
An Open Letter to Michael Moore on Gen. Wesley Clark
Mitchel Cohen
Don't Be Fooled Again: Gen. Wesley Clark, War Criminal
Norman Madarasz
Targeting Arafat
Richard Forno
High Tech Heroin
Alexander Cockburn
Behold,
the Head of a Neo-Con!
Website of the Day
The Ultimate Palestine Resource Site!
September 16, 2003
Rosemary and Walt Brasch
An
Ill Wind: Hurricane Isabel and the Lack of Homeland Security
Robert Fisk
Powell
in Baghdad
Kurt Nimmo
Imperial Sociopaths
M. Shahid Alam
The Dialectics
of Terror
Ron Jacobs
Exile at Gunpoint
Christopher Brauchli
Bush's War on Wages
Al Krebs
Stop Calling Them "Farm Subsidies"; It's Corporate
Welfare
Patrick Cockburn
The
Iraq Wreck
Website of the Day
From Occupied Palestine
The Great Alejandro Escavedo Needs Your Help!
September 15, 2003
Stan Goff
It Was
the Oil; It Is Like Vietnam
Robert Fisk
A Hail of Bullets, a Trail of Dead
Writers Bloc
We
Are Winning: a Report from Cancun
James T. Phillips
Does George Bush Cry?
Elaine Cassel
The Troublesome Bill of Rights
Cynthia McKinney
A Message to the People of New York City
Matthew Behrens
Sunday Morning Coming Down: Reflections on Johnny Cash
Uri Avnery
Assassinating
Arafat
Hammond Guthrie
Celling Out the Alarm
Website of the Day
Arnold and the Egg
September 13 / 14, 2003
Michael Neumann
Anti-Americanism:
Too Much of a Good Thing?
Jeffrey St. Clair
Anatomy of a Swindle
Gary Leupp
The Matrix of Ignorance
Ron Jacobs
Reagan's America
Brian Cloughley
Up to a Point, Lord Rumsfeld
William S. Lind
Making Mesopotamia a Terrorist Magnet
Werther
A Modest Proposal for the Pentagon
Dave Lindorff
Friendly Fire Will Doom the Occupation
Toni Solo
Fiction and Reality in Colombia: The Trial of the Bogota Three
Elaine Cassel
Juries and the Death Penalty
Mickey Z.
A Parable for Cancun
Jeffrey Sommers
Issam Nashashibi: a Life Dedicated to the Palestinian Cause
David Vest
Driving in No Direction (with a Glimpse of Johnny Cash)
Michael Yates
The Minstrel Show
Jesse Walker
Adios, Johnny Cash
Adam Engel
Something Killer
Poets' Basement
Cash, Albert, Curtis, Linhart
Website of the Weekend
Local Harvest
September 12, 2003
Writers Block
Todos
Somos Lee: Protest and Death in Cancun
Laura Carlsen
A Knife to the Heart: WTO Kills Farmers
Dave Lindorff
The Meaning of Sept. 11
Elaine Cassel
Bush at Quantico
Linda S. Heard
British
Entrance Exams
John Chuckman
The First Two Years of Insanity
Doug Giebel
Ending America as We Know It
Mokhiber / Weissman
The Blank Check Military
Subcomandante Marcos
The
Death Train of the WTO
Website of the Day
A Woman in Baghdad
September 11, 2003
Robert Fisk
A Grandiose
Folly
Roger Burbach
State Terrorism and 9/11: 1973 and 2001
Jonathan Franklin
The Pinochet Files
Niranjan Ramakrishnan
Postcards to the President
Norman Solomon
The Political Capital of 9/11
Saul Landau
The Chilean Coup: the Other, Almost Forgotten 9/11
Stew Albert
What Goes Around
Website of the Day
The Sights and Sounds of a Coup
September 10, 2003
John Ross
Cancun
Reality Show: Will It Turn Into a Tropical Seattle?
Zoltan Grossman
The General Who Would be President: Was Wesley Clark Also Unprepared
for the Postwar Bloodbath?
Tim Llewellyn
At the Gates of Hell
Christopher Brauchli
Turn the Paige: the Bush Education Deception
Lee Sustar
Bring the Troops Home, Now!
Elaine Cassel
McCain-Feingold in Trouble: Scalia Hogs the Debate
Norman Finkelstein
Hitchens
as Model Apostate
Hammond Guthrie
When All Was Said and Done
Website of the Day
Fact Checking Colin Powell
Hot Stories
Steve Niva
Israel's
Assassination Policy: the Trigger for Suicide Bombings?
Dardagan,
Slobodo and Williams
CounterPunch Exclusive:
20,000 Wounded Iraqi Civilians
Steve
J.B.
Prison Bitch
Sheldon
Rampton and John Stauber
True Lies: the Use of Propaganda
in the Iraq War
Wendell
Berry
Small Destructions Add Up
CounterPunch
Wire
WMD: Who Said What When
Cindy
Corrie
A Mother's Day Talk: the Daughter
I Can't Hear From
William Blum
Myth
and Denial in the War on Terrorism
Standard Schaefer
Experimental Casinos: DARPA and the War Economy
Uzma
Aslam Khan
The Unbearably Grim Aftermath of War:
What America Says Does Not Go
Paul de Rooij
Arrogant
Propaganda
Gore Vidal
The
Erosion of the American Dream
Francis Boyle
Impeach
Bush: A Draft Resolution
Click Here
for More Stories.
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September
23, 2003
Going to Jail for
the Cause: Part 2
Charity Ryerson: Young and
Radical
By STEVEN HIGGS
Five days before Charity Ryerson surrendered herself
to the minimum security Federal Prison Camp at Pekin, Ill., she
spoke nonchalantly about the six months she would serve for cutting
a padlock during a protest at the School of the Americas. Curled
up on the couch in The Bloomington Alternative office, Ryerson
was unapologetic about her crime, and seemingly unphased about
her time.
"Personally, I'm going to put this
on my resume," she said. "I'm not going to decide that
I want to join corporate America and have this thing erased.
It's part of my lifelong commitment to activism. ...
"There's a girl who just got out
of the jail I'm going to. I got a letter from her, and she said
I'd probably have to work in the welding shop. I'll be carrying
around metal. I'll be the tool girl for a month or something.
It sounds really boring."
As her first month as federal prisoner
#91335-020 drew to a close, 21-year-old Ryerson was no less sanguine
when she wrote the Alternative in mid-August: "It's not
quite as easy here as I'd hoped, but I'm almost through my first
month. I'll certainly come out unscathed."
Unscathed, perhaps, but not unaffected
- and apparently not undeterred in her mission as a social justice
activist. Ryerson's note was accompanied by a stack of material
she had already gathered on "mandatory minimums." She
promised to send information on the "prison industrial complex."
Included in the information packet were
articles on the crushing impacts that federal mandatory minimum
sentencing guidelines in drug cases have on the lives of people
like fellow Pekin inmate Diana Webb.
A former attorney from Kansas City, Mo.,
with no criminal record, Webb is serving 150 months in prison
for Conspiracy to Manufacture Methamphetamine, even though no
drugs were ever produced, and her three co-defendants initially
provided sworn testimony that she was not involved.
Webb's co-defendants included a man who
never did a single minute of jail time for forcing his way into
her house and beating her with a baseball bat and a tire iron.
He and his colleagues received reduced sentences of 46 to 60
months in prison in the drug conspiracy case after they changed
their stories to help prosecutors convict Webb.
"This gives a little background
on one of the appalling cases in here," Ryerson wrote. "Since
she was an attorney, she has the best documentation of her case,
but I don't think that this is isolated."
"Anyway, tons of women here with
tons they want to say but nobody hears them. Congress ignores
them because they're felons and can't vote. The media pay little
attention. They feel very isolated and don't know how to get
their stories out. It's strange how trapped one can feel in a
prison with no fence."
***
In some ways, Charity Ryerson's prison
term is the fulfillment of a career goal. The Indianapolis native
turned Bloomington activist has been committing acts of civil
disobedience for a variety of social justice issues since she
was 19.
While attending school on a full scholarship
at Loyola University, Ryerson was the eighth member of the "Loyola
7," who were arrested while protesting economic justice
issues at Nike Town in the Chicago loop. "It was supposed
to be the Loyola 8," she said. "I just sat there, and
they arrested everyone around me. They wouldn't arrest me."
Ryerson had twice before joined the thousands
of protesters who, since 1990, have annually converged on the
U.S. Army's School of the Americas at Fort Benning, Ga., a/k/a
the School of the Assassins. The SOA is a U.S. government-sponsored
terrorist training camp for military thugs from Latin America
and other Third World countries. Its alumni include former Panamanian
strongman Manuel Noriega and the 1989 killers of six Jesuit priests
in El Salvador. The protest is held on Nov. 17, the anniversary
of the Salvadoran slayings.
"This was my third year going down,"
Ryerson said of the 2002 SOA protest. "I had crossed the
line before, but there were too may people that year, so I didn't
get arrested. They just bused me off and dropped me off."
Led by New England priest and SOA Watch
founder Father Ray Bourgeois, the SOA protests have grown steadily
and raised awareness about the U.S government's complicity in
human rights violations worldwide. Last year's drew more than
7,000 protesters, 96 of whom were arrested, including seven nuns
and 10 minors.
Ryerson said that after 9/11, the U.S.
Department of Defense, which had assumed control over the SOA
and renamed it the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security
Cooperation, erected a fence to keep the protesters from entering
the base.
"They put up this stupid little
fence that sort of goes down to this creek," Ryerson explained,
"and all the nuns go down and wade through the creek to
get around, and it's kind of a pain if you're old and all that.
So we decided to cut this lock on this little pedestrian gate,
to sort of push the envelope."
Logistically, cutting the bolt made it
easier for elderly protesters to enter the base, Ryerson said,
and it may have prompted more people to do so.
"But also, it sort of radicalized
the movement a little bit," she said. "The SOA movement
isn't really radical. It's very religious and sort of spiritual.
It's a lot of prayer and singing. The actual civil disobedience
is a funeral procession. It's really very Catholic. What we wanted
to do was to push the envelope and make it a little more radical."
The other half of the "we"
Ryerson referred to was her partner Jeremy John, a 22-year-old
Bloomington activist who brought the bolt cutters and busted
the lock and is likewise serving six months in federal prison
in Terre Haute.
The 86 adults who were arrested were
prosecuted for Class B and C misdemeanors of trespassing. Ryerson
and John were also charged with trespassing and destruction of
federal property, an A misdemeanor.
***
Charity Ryerson may be only 21 years
old, but she has a solid grasp of the role that nonviolent civil
disobedience has played throughout American history. She cites
a litany of examples, from the Boston Tea Party to the Civil
Rights movement of the mid-20th Century.
"People act like this sort of radical
action is something new or something atrocious," she said.
"Well, that's not true. It's been happening and happening
and happening throughout history. And it's been a really important
part of history. A lot of people think that the civil rights
movement would have gone through just fine had no one pushed
the envelope."
Indeed, Ryerson sees radical action through
creative, nonviolent civil disobedience as a legitimate, necessary
component of the 21st Century global struggle for social, environmental
and economic justice. And, based on her first-person observation
of repression in the Mexican state of Chiapas and her experience
as a student organizer against the World Bank, Ryerson argues
the times demand it.
"I don't know what else to do,"
she said. "When I think about the stuff that I know we have
been doing for so long with our foreign policy, and what we've
been doing in Latin America, what we've been doing in Southeast
Asia with our sweat shops and with Free Trade, and with Plan
Colombia and the Drug War, and obviously I can go on and on and
on forever."
As she prepared to become one of the
statistics, Ryerson also pointed out that the United States has
the highest per capita incarceration rate in the world. And more
than half, 58 percent, are imprisoned for nonviolent crimes -
like Diana Webb.
"That's way above and beyond Russia
and other places that have high percentages in prison,"
Ryerson said. "And so, we've got this huge clamp down by
our government on the people, and I just feel like it's tightening
and tightening and tightening. And if we can't finally wake up
and see what we're doing to the rest of the world ... "
She cited the impact of the decision
to "push the envelope" at last year's SOA Watch protest
as an example of the power of civil disobedience.
"We've gotten a lot of media coverage
for this. When I think of the number of people who know what
the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation is,
just in Indiana, and consider that there were 86 people prosecuted
from all over the country. ..."
"I would guess that because of the
two of us, maybe 500 people - not including media coverage, the
people that read the articles - know about it that didn't before.
When your friend goes to jail, or a friend of your friend goes
to jail, or your client's daughter goes to jail - it's like those
links seem sort of insignificant, but they're not. They're actually
huge."
"When I think about the effect that
one stupid little padlock has had, I mean, it's ridiculous. That
padlock cost 12 dollars, and look at the impact."
***
To keep her scholarship at Loyola, Ryerson
would have to return to school upon her release from prison in
January. Chicago in January, two weeks after classes started?
Perhaps not, she says. "I'll probably just hang out down
here."
She and John will be on probation for
a year and will not be allowed to leave their hometowns without
permission. But Ryerson does not see that as too inhibiting a
factor in her work.
"Yeah, we're kind of at their mercy,"
she said. "So that's kind of irritating. But, at the same
time, there are a lot of things to do without breaking the law.
I've been very busy for the past two years being an activist,
and I've never ... I guess I've broken the law a few times, but
I haven't actually been caught."
And there's no lack of issues to work
on, she says, "There's tons, and I'm sure I can easily go
a year working my ass off without getting arrested and get good
work done. Personally, I'm really drawn to the I-69 thing. When
I get out, I'm really excited about that."
"So, at least for me, there's a
bazillion issues. And radical action is almost, I mean, it's
urgent, it's necessary, it needs to be happening more."
Steven Higgs
is editor of The
Bloomington Alternative, where this article originally appeared.
He can be reached at: editor@BloomingtonAlternative.com
Weekend
Edition Features for Sept. 20 / 22, 2003
Uri Avnery
The
Silliest Show in Town
Alexander
Cockburn
Lighten
Up, America!
Peter Linebaugh
On the Bicentennial of the Execution of Robert Emmet
Anne Brodsky
Return
to Afghanistan
Saul Landau
Guillermo and Me
Phan Nguyen
Mother Jones Smears Rachel Corrie
Gila Svirsky
Sharon, With Eyes Wide Open
Gary Leupp
On Apache Terrorism
Kurt Nimmo
Colin
Powell: Exploiting the Dead of Halabja
Brian
Cloughley
Colin Powell's Shame
Carol Norris
The Moral Development of George W. Bush
Bill Glahn
The Real Story Behind RIAA Propaganda
Adam Engel
An Interview with Danny Scechter, the News Dissector
Dave Lindorff
Good Morning, Vietnam!
Mark Scaramella
Contracts and Politics in Iraq
John Ross
WTO
Collapses in Cancun: Autopsy of a Fiasco Foretold
Justin Podur
Uribe's Desperate Squeals
Toni Solo
The Colombia Three: an Interview with Caitriona Ruane
Steven Sherman
Workers and Globalization
David
Vest
Masked and Anonymous: Dylan's Elegy for a Lost America
Ron Jacobs
Politics of the Hip-Hop Pimps
Poets
Basement
Krieger, Guthrie and Albert
Website of the
Weekend
Ted Honderich:
Terrorism for Humanity?
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