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by Michael Russelle

The use of torture by the U.S. military and other federal agencies is shameful, and I deeply appreciate Barbara Scott Murdock's incisive and informative commentary on this issue in the October Bugle.

The U.S. Senate has been equally troubled by this issue, as shown by their overwhelming approval of the "McCain amendment" to restrict interrogation methods by the military. I applaud their action but wish they had applied it to all federal agencies.

Our President threatens to veto the entire Defense Authorization Bill if this amendment is included, claiming it would unduly limit our ability to obtain crucial information from detainees. How can President Bush in good conscience tell John McCain that torture is warranted and useful?

Torture is an unpleasant subject, but at a neighborhood forum on October 30 we have a chance to learn how to eliminate torture. One speaker, Dr. Steven Miles, has investigated the antithetical role military physicians have played in torture. Holly Ziemer, director of communications at the Center for Victims of Torture, will discuss what the CVT does to heal victims.

To learn how we can help eliminate torture, join your neighbors at 6:30 p.m. on October 30 at the St. Anthony Park United Church of Christ.

Letters to the Editor, Park Bugle, November, 2005

by Barbara Scott Murdock

During the Revolutionary War, George Washington committed our nation to human rights. While the British were attacking New Jersey residents and revolutionary troops with rape, pillage, and execution, according to D.H. Fischer's Pulitzer prize-winning history, Washington ordered his soldiers to protect prisoners. "Treat them with humanity," he said, "and let them have no reason to complain of our copying the brutal example of the British army…"

Today, members of Minnesota's Congressional delegation are following his lead. Senators Dayton and Coleman have co-sponsored Senate Bill S. 365, reauthorizing funding for the Centers for Victims of Torture. Representatives Ramstad, Oberstar, McCollum, Sabo, and Kennedy, are co-sponsors of a similar bill, H.R. 2017.

These bills deserve support. Treatment for victims of torture is an act of a civilized, humane society.

But are we treating victims of torture with one hand, only to create more victims with the other? Continuing reports of torture and deaths of detainees at the hands of Americans in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Guantanamo are deeply disturbing.

Physical and psychological torture, stress and duress, and near-drowning techniques are not only reprehensible, but illegal under U.S. law. They are illegal under international law; the United States is a signatory to both the United Nations Convention Against Torture and the Geneva Conventions. And they are illegal under our Constitution, which guarantees us no "cruel and unusual punishment."

Yet torture at our hands continues. Even when our personnel are not tormenting prisoners directly, our government has transferred detainees, for detention, interrogation, or trial, to countries that practice torture. Memos from now-attorney general Alberto Gonzales and others claim that laws prohibiting torture "do not apply to the President's detention and interrogation of enemy combatants…" to constitute torture, pain must include "injury such as death, organ failure, or serious impairment of body functions…" that war on terrorism "renders obsolete Geneva's strict limitations on questioning of enemy prisoners…"

But using torture undoes everything we want to accomplish in the name of freedom. Here are the reasons:

Torture doesn't work. Terrified people in pain say anything to stop the pain. Experienced FBI, CIA, and military interrogators testify that torture doesn't work, produces unreliable information, and distracts from the hard work of legal interrogation. Moreover, militants are often trained to resist torture and give false information.

Torture endangers our troops and citizens abroad. Americans taken prisoner as civilians or as soldiers are more likely to be tortured because the world now sees our country as one that tortures people.

Torture corrupts those who use it. Societies that use torture often broaden its application, fishing for information among the innocent as well as among the guilty. Torture becomes a weapon to terrorize citizens and keep them docile. Even torturers are traumatized, torn between their actions and their relationships with friends and family. In trying to dehumanize their victims, they dehumanize themselves.

Torture undermines our moral and legal standing in the world. The United States of America stands for something. We are a nation of laws, liberty, and justice for all. We've followed our high standards imperfectly, but enough that other nations have long seen us as a beacon of hope.

The Bush administration's support for torture does not reflect our standards and ideals. The administration continues to shield those who set the tone for abuses at Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, and other prisons. Investigations into abuses at Abu Ghraib, for example, focused on eight people on the bottom rung, while several officers in charge were promoted, despite their failure to enforce proper interrogation policies.

We need Congressional action to help correct the administration's excesses. We need an independent commission with full powers, including subpoena power, to investigate reports of torture and hold accountable the officials who set the tone for torture.

Bills funding the Centers for Victims of Torture should be passed, but we can also support bills that would prohibit the U.S. from outsourcing torture to other countries (S. 654 and H.R. 952). We can support the amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act for 2006 (S. 1042) that would prohibit cruel, inhumane, or degrading treatment of people in U.S. custody. Three Republican Senators-John McCain (AZ), John Warner (VA), and Lindsey Graham (SC)-have sponsored this amendment-yet the president threatens to veto the bill if it contains the amendment.

"A decent respect for the opinion of mankind" demands that we end the use of torture. As Senator McCain argues, echoing George Washington, the debate over torture is "not about who they [detainees or terrorists] are, but about who we are."

Commentary, Park Bugle, October, 2005

by Regula Russelle

As a member of Minnesota Neighbors for Peace, I thank the Bugle and particularly Judy Woodward, who wrote a wonderful story in last month's issue announcing our Mother's Day Peace Concert presented by Music in the Park.

It was a huge success! We had a fabulous turnout and collected several thousand dollars for the American Refugee Committee to benefit survivors of war.

Many thanks to Butch Thompson, Vern and Michael Sutton, Thelma Hunter and Laura Sewell, and to the St. Anthony Park United Church of Christ for hosting the event.

In an interview with Judy, I was unclear about our numbers. Membership in St. Anthony Park Neighbors for Peace is informal, but hearteningly large. Fifteen to 20 of us continue to serve as the core planning committee, 425 people have asked to be included on our list, and new people continue to join in our effort to help bring about a more peaceful world.

Letters to the Editor, Park Bugle, June, 2005

by Judy Woodward

In his photos, Bill Holm resembles an aging Icelandic bard with flowing white locks and a ruddy, weather-toughened face. Then he opens his mouth. What emerges sounds like nothing less than the words of an Old Testament prophet.

Holm, the award-winning poet and essayist from Southwest Minnesota State University at Marshall, has surveyed the moral landscape of his native land, and he finds it greatly wanting. "We've been beastly and stupid in the amazing number of wars and catastrophes we cause for one another," he says. "Americans have not been guiltless in the past, and we surely are not guiltless at the moment."

On Sunday, May 8, Holm and fellow artists Butch Thompson, Laura Sewell and Thelma Hunter will participate in what Holm calls a "moral event": two Mother's Day Concerts for Peace to be held at the St. Anthony Park United Church of Christ.

Sponsored jointly by local chapters of Minnesota Neighbors for Peace and Music in the Park Series, the concerts will raise money for the American Refugee Committee in order to benefit war survivors.

Holm describes the event as a "concert in which we say there are more important things, more useful things than war. There's more than hatred, mistrust, fear and suspicion. We have to start singing for one another."

Although known more for his poetry and his mesmerizing stage presence, Holm may just mean that literally. "I never know when I'm going to break out in song," he says with an admonitory edge in his voice.

For the others on the platform, the songs may come more easily. Butch Thompson is a Minnesota musical institution, the man who some say single-handedly revived the ragtime jazz tradition. Cellist Laura Sewell, a St. Anthony Park resident, and pianist Thelma Hunter are both well-known Twin Cities classical musicians. Like Thompson, they have performed frequently with Music in the Park Series.

As for Holm, 61, whether he is declaiming poetry or playing his specialty piano pieces for the left hand, he's no newcomer to the rhetoric of protest. "I was an ordinary person demonstrating against the Vietnam War. I thought that life couldn't get any more venal, more stupid than that war," he explains. "And then came the last 25 years."

Holm sees important differences between anti-war thinking of the Vietnam era and now. "We thought then that the Vietnam War was a kind of anomaly," he says. "It was wounding to American idealism. There was a deliberate naïveté."

Butch Thompson says that feelings of frustration prompted him to come up with the idea of a peace concert, and he stresses that the concert is not intended as a "political event." Thompson may not wield Holm's rhetorical bludgeon, but his convictions are no less deep for being quietly voiced. "I don't like this war," he says. "The current administration's policies are not mine."

When Thompson got the idea for a benefit concert, he knew the right people to contact for help.

"I really like the people involved in Neighbors for Peace. They're protesting the right way, because they're not out to insult and alienate the other side. I'd rather do something positive. It's easier to be negative, but it's not going to accomplish anything."

St. Anthony Park resident Regula Russelle is a member of the local chapter of Minnesota Neighbors for Peace, a grass roots organization formed during the build-up to the war in Iraq.

Membership in the St. Anthony Park group, she says, peaked at about 400 during the intense days just before the March 2003 invasion of Iraq. Active participants nowadays are down to a steadfast core of 14 or 15, but Russelle is undismayed.

"Our objective is to bring about a culture of peace," she says. "We're feeling our way as we go. We're interested in dialogue and in building bridges. That's true here in the neighborhood, and true in the way we'd like to have our country be involved in international affairs."

Julie Himmelstrup, artistic director of Music in the Park Series, had also considered the idea of promoting a peace benefit concert, and her organization agreed to handle the logistics of the upcoming performance. Thompson says there will be "all kinds" of music at the concert, from ragtime to classical, including a special version of the old gospel classic "Ain't Gonna Study War No More."

Holm plans to read poems about "war and public life and community." He describes some of his poetry as "funerary monuments," noting, "You don't want to be a character in my books because you have to be dead to be there."

If Holm shows a more than passing concern with mortality, it may be understandable. He is recovering from recent heart surgery, having "dodged the bullet 13 years ago" when he suffered his first heart attack. He calls himself "an old guy with bad habits who loves cigarettes."

He sees himself as the embattled bearer of tidings that some Americans would prefer not to hear. "My job is to bring news of civilization," he says. "Anybody who goes outside the United States must have some idea what we look like to others. It can't cheer them up."

His advice? "Don't listen to Karl Rove. Listen to anybody looking at us from across the room. Stay close to the border.".

Holm regularly takes his own counsel. He spends his summers in Iceland, the land of his ancestors, where things seem "sane, decent, quiet and civilized."

Although he professes not to have much hope for the future, "not in the long run-or the short run either," his natural ebullience makes him unsuited to despair. "I love the world-music, friends, poetry," he proclaims. "I love my life and I intend to go on living it."

The May 8 Concert for Peace will offer performances at 3 and 7 p.m. at St. Anthony Park UCC, 2129 Commonwealth Avenue, with a reception to follow the concerts. Tickets are $25, of which $20 is a tax-deductible contribution to the American Refugee Committee. Tickets may be ordered from Music in the Park Series, 2255 Doswell Avenue, Suite 201, St. Paul, MN 55108.

Tickets will also be available at Micawber's Books and the Bibelot Shop in St. Anthony Park. For more information, call Music in the Park Series at 645-5699.

Park Bugle, May, 2005

by Stephanie O'Donnell

Any 18 year old male readers applying for financial need may find themselves running into registration for the armed services. Registration is required by law, but now anyone applying for FAFSA will have to be registered if they wish to complete the application. For many, registering for the draft doesn't seem like a big deal. It's just another part of getting older. However, as unimaginable as it may seem right now, the draft may someday come back. If it did return, would you be ready? How much do you know about the war and how it could affect you?

St. Anthony Park Neighbors for Peace are organizing an informational meeting, which will take place at 7 p.m. on May 3rd, at St. Anthony Park Lutheran Church. "No Child Left Unrecruited" welcomes all that are interested, intending to educate teens and their parents on essential information about preparing for a draft. Topics that will be covered include basics of what a draft is, what to expect if the draft is reinstated (will girls be included? will being in college make a difference?), as well as how to start a folder if you should choose to be a conscientious objector. For more information, visit http://www.parkpeace.org/military.html

Roseville Area High School student newspaper, April 2005

by Chuck Dayton

It certainly wasn't the fault of the energetic freshman organizer that only a dozen kids showed up to hear my Earth Day talk last year on global climate change. A bundle of kinetic energy, she had cajoled six of her close friends, plastered the announcements all over the small college campus and offered free cookies.

In my PowerPoint presentation, I laid out the case that human-caused climate change is really happening, that Earth really is starting to heat up and that there will be a big environmental price to pay. I told them it's their problem, not mine (I'm 65), and asked, why do you think Americans don't seem to give a damn? They observed that the culture is selfish, and agreed we won't get the job done without a major shift in political will.

I left the meeting telling myself that it was worth it if I motivated a couple of kids. But this was a far cry from the first Earth Day of 1970, when several thousand students showed up at the University of Minnesota to hear Ralph Nader and were inspired to organize one of the first public interest research groups (PIRGs), which I soon joined as a young lawyer.

Just as I was getting into my Prius (the hybrid car that makes me vaguely smug) I felt the deep bass vibrations of a stereo booming through the heavy steel of a yellow Hummer. It rolled into the parking lot, top lights lit, and the lights continued to burn as the tall young driver sauntered toward the student union.

You scumbag, I thought. You are the epitome of the problem! How can you drive this monument to American arrogance, this fuel-devouring war machine? Does it make you feel powerful? Why not volunteer for the Army and drive a real Hummer in Fallujah? Did your Daddy give you this? There's no way you paid for it. Does it help you pick up girls? You probably get gentleman's C's and are just marking time till you can take over Daddy's business. Jerk!

Whoa there, I told myself, when my blood pressure fell to near normal. Why does this kid think it's cool to drive this obscene car? Sure, it is one of the worst symbols of our affluent and wasteful culture, but his attitude is probably not much different from most in a country where half of the cars are SUVs, where fuel efficiency is less than it was 25 years ago, where 4 percent of the world's population produces 30 percent of the world's heat-trapping gases, and advertisers appeal to our individualism (you earned it, you deserve it, bigger is better). This kid is simply doing what American culture tells him to do.

And, come to think of it, those of us with good educations and comfortable incomes, who sanctimoniously drive our hybrids, are probably not much better in terms of our overall per capita generation of carbon dioxide.

Our dirty little secret is that we fly about the country on business and pleasure, and take a couple of long (often international) flights for vacations each year (air travel is a quarter of the transportation emissions), and we often own two houses (one in town, one at the lake) that have to be heated and air-conditioned, causing about 20 times the carbon emissions of the average Chinese citizen.

What, then, must we do?

First, take personal responsibility for our own energy use, by buying efficient cars, lightbulbs and appliances and by insulating our houses well. It really does matter.

Second, we can buy offsets for the carbon emissions that we cause through air travel or otherwise. Each mile of air travel causes about 1 pound of carbon emissions per person. For a 2,000-mile trip to Colorado to go skiing, I can offset the carbon emissions for about $30, by paying a nonprofit group to fund projects like restoring rainforests, or providing efficient lighting in developing countries. (Just Google "carbon offsets.")

Finally, in the public sphere, what else can we do but to try to work smarter: organize, preach, lobby, sue, donate, write, find smarter solutions and strategies to build the critical mass and the political will in all segments of our society to bring change. As my ex-hero, Ralph Nader, said in the early '70s, "Despair is the luxury of an intellectual dilettante."

There will come a day when driving cars like the Hummer will not be cool, when it will be as socially unacceptable as blowing smoke in someone's face; when more kids think like my freshman organizer and not like Mr. Hummer. The day will even come when our power plants and our cars don't emit nearly as much carbon dioxide -- the most significant gas contributing to global climate change.The question is whether we will bend the curve too late and too little to avoid major damage to polar bears and coral polyps, to Bangladesh and Boston, to farmers and flamingos -- in short, to the planet and its community of life.

Chuck Dayton, St. Paul, is an environmental lawyer and board member of the Minnesota Center for Environmental Advocacy.

Commentary, Minneapolis Star Tribue, April 22, 2005

by Grant Abbott, St. Paul; executive director, St. Paul Area Council of Churches

How can the University of Minnesota be a first-class public research university without racial diversity? So far I have not seen an adequate replacement for General College's distinguished efforts to increase the diversity of the university's student body.

Whereas the University of Minnesota's student body has 16 percent students of color, the student bodies of universities to which it hopes to be equal, the University of California-Berkeley and the University of Michigan (Ann Arbor), have 57 percent and 27 percent students of color respectively.

When the student body of the University of Minnesota is 25 percent students of color, not counting General College's students, the university can then close General College. Until that time I believe the university has a great deal of work to do to serve the students of color in this state and from around the country.

Letters to the Editor, Minneapolis Star Tribune, April 7, 2005

by Sheila Richter

One of the wonderful things about our neighborhood is the willingness of people to get involved in hard and serious issues. On Sunday, January 9th, a meeting of the St. Anthony Park Neighbors for Peace filled the fellowship hall at the St. Anthony Park United Church of Christ to talk about how to get out of Iraq. Phil Steger, Director of Friends for a NonViolent World, spoke. Of course he had no easy answers, and there were lots of questions and lots of discussion.

While the goal of a democratic and free Iraq is laudable, U.S. policies have failed to achieve this goal. Instead in Iraq we have hundreds of deaths, devastated cities, no basic security, widespread lack of basic services like water and electricity, and an increasingly violent guerilla war. We need to help our leaders change failed policies while saving face.

How can we bring our troops home with dignity? How can we de-escalate the violence? How can we create a situation where reconstruction contracts go to Iraqui individuals and companies rather than to foreign companies, thus giving jobs, profits, and control to Iraquis in their own land?

Phil Steger recently discussed ideas developed by Friends for a Non Violent World. A number of Minnesota national legislators have met with representatives of FNVW and have expressed support for these ideas.

It was surprisingly hopeful to focus on creative problem solving rather than despair in contemplating the escalating chaos in Iraq. I urge all who would "rather light a candle than curse the dark" to contact FNVW (651) 917-0383 or www.fnvw.org for Iraq Peace Plan ideas. And then write your legislators, of course.

Letters to the Editor, Park Bugle, February, 2005