[Peace] WILL "Public Square" re Kathy Kelly

[C. G. Estabrook]

[The following comment will air this afternoon, 4:45 and 6:45. --CGE]

I'm Carl Estabrook, of the local anti-war group AWARE.

Despite the huge anti-war demonstrations that preceded the US invasion 
of Iraq, the anti-war movement today contrasts sharply with that of the 
Vietnam era -- or of the Reagan wars in Latin America.  Journalist 
Alexander Cockburn recently wrote that there are only

"a few good efforts -- the anti-recruitment campaigns, the tours of 
Military Families Against the War, ... the efforts of some returning 
vets, the stands taken by some enlistees refusing deployment to the 
Middle East—and three or four brave souls. Cindy Sheehan single-handedly 
reanimated the anti-war movement last year; ... there is also the 
radical Catholic Kathy Kelly..."

There is indeed Kathy Kelly, who will visit Champaign-Urbana next week 
for a series of talks and lectures.  Ms. Kelly, from Chicago, is an 
American peace activist, pacifist, and three-time Nobel Peace Prize 
nominee.  She was active with the Catholic Worker movement and, as a 
pacifist, has refused to pay federal income taxes for 25 years.

In 1988 she was sentenced to prison for planting corn on a nuclear 
missile site.  Her account of her arrest by an embarrassed young rural 
soldier is hilarious -- until one realizes that it took place directly 
over a weapon of the sort the administration is threatening to use 
again, many times the force of the Hiroshima bomb.

Kelly served nine months in a maximum security prison.  She claims that 
attending Catholic school prepared her for the experience.

At the beginning of the Gulf War, in 1991, she was part of a peace 
encampment on the Iraq-Saudi border and helped coordinate medical relief 
convoys, as she also did in Bosnia and Haiti.  During the Clinton 
administration she and friends formed a group to use nonviolent civil 
disobedience against America's ongoing economic and military warfare 
against the Iraqi people. They organized over seventy delegations to 
Iraq in violation of the US/UK economic sanctions, which caused the 
deaths of a half million children.

In the spring of 2004, she served three months at Pekin federal prison 
for her non-violent witness against the so-called School for Assassins 
at Fort Benning, GA.  She is currently co-coordinator of Voices for 
Creative Nonviolence and the author of several books, notably OTHER 
LANDS HAVE DREAMS: FROM BAGHDAD TO PEKIN PRISON.

Her principal talk in town will on Thursday, October 4, at 7pm, at the 
Community United Church of Christ, 6th and Daniel streets in Champaign. 
  The title is "BATTLEFIELD WITHOUT BORDERS, CONSEQUENCES WITHOUT END." 
  For more information, see the AWARE website at ANTI DASH WAR, DOT NET.

	###