By Becci Robbins and Brett Bursey
SC Progressive Network

About 25 activists met yesterday in Columbia to talk about the future and direction of the South Carolina chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, which in April was taken over by the national after years of poor management and in-fighting. While the national organization has twice before taken over a state chapter, this is the first time in the ACLU’s nearly 90-year history that it has done so without the affiliate’s blessing.

It’s too bad that it has come to this, but it appears it was the only way the SC ACLU was ever going to get out of the ditch it has been mired in for more than a decade. Under the leadership of libertarian David Kennison, the chapter has been at ideological odds with the national organization and has alienated longtime SC ACLU supporters and board members.

It didn’t help that the SC ACLU hired a series of executive directors who ranged from inept to corrupt. The last director was fired after it was discovered that her law license had been suspended and that she was stealing money from the chapter.

Tension deepened two years ago, when the chapter became the only state affiliate to sign onto a Web site criticising the ACLU’s national director, Anthony Romero. Kennison has argued that the chapter take-over is tied to his past criticism of Romero. (You can read more about this dispute in The Nation.)

All this drama has not come without a price. While the SC ACLU has been battling with itself, abuses of civil liberties have gone unchallenged. Absent, too, has been a clear and consistent voice in the South Carolina media addressing privacy concerns, chronic problems regarding the separation of church and state, and a host of other legal and legislative matters.

Yesterday’s meeting in Columbia was the first in a series that the ACLU will hold across the state in an effort to gather input and chart a new course. If you want to add your two cents, the organization is soliciting feedback through an online survey.

We wish the new SC ACLU well.

Wade Fulmer, Columbia
member of Veterans for Peace

Beth, a mother and grandmother, is a Military Families Speak Out member who delivered this speech at a week ago conference.

The battles of blood for oil are far from over. Our soldiers and families and Iraqis continue to suffer by the unending occupations of two wars of six and seven years, killing our own, bomb bomb bombing McCainiac style Iraqi children and families by way of the madness of Administration and the lack of a Congress of conscience to govern by Our Own Constitution. The Congress continues bankrupt funding of carnage and refuse to hold Captiol Hill war criminal politicos responsible for killing and maiming war crimes against humanity. There is a Constitution, yes, that must be revived, lived! There is no Congress with the will to speak for peoples, to end their sufferings, deployment extensions, and stop loss betrayals of those who serve.

OUR America must strongly voice the inner outrage, must rebell against pharisean, unchristian, illegal, unconscionable war, its fear mongering myth, and the damn the peace arrogance of warful officials who are not representatives of the People. 

We on this 4th of July must reclaim and demand the rights of truth and Constitution to protect and defend for the care and honorable service that our soldier loved ones seek, to end the abusive murders of families and sovereign peoples. There is no obligation nor honor nor empathy as they suffer and die for the corporate war profits machine who bribe the Congress for monied bloodshed. Confront and hold officials accountable. Hold, protect and defend soldiers and families as your loved ones. 

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Beth’s Speech

I have four scary words for you: we need to talk.

I need to share with you some of my experiences with Military Families Speak Out, a national organization with 4,000 members whose loved ones have served or are serving in the military.

And here’s the problem — unless you have skin in the game — and members of MFSO do, you may not understand what’s really at stake here, or even care. 

But we need each other.

Some of you may think that anyone who goes into the military is either stupid, blood-thirsty or deserving of what they get for fighting in an illegal and immoral war. But we know them as kids needing a job, health care or educational benefits. Good men and women just like your brothers and sisters — sons and daughters.

We, as a nation, have been sheltered from the reality of this war, but I’d like to share some of our experiences with you. Share what it is like to see the young Marine with his face burned beyond recognition, just eyes and a mouth, his ears and an arm missing — looking lost in a hospital cafeteria. 

To share with you what it’s like to spend Mother’s Day at Arlington Cemetery, accompanying mothers who go to visit their only children,  who lie buried among sea of other parents’ children who will never again know the embrace of their mother. Each is someone’s beloved child.

We need you to listen to us. We need you to HEAR us. 

Hear about Pierre Piche, who was killed in a helicopter crash in 2004. When Pierre wrote home to his family, he didn’t ask for things for himself, but rather for food to take care of the many stray animals around him. The last picture of him is with a donkey that had wandered into his tent. I think of him, and I see the picture of him holding a tiny puppy, with a wide smile across his face.

I think of my own daughter-in-law, who wrote that the children at the nearby refugee camp in Afghanistan had no warm clothes for the approaching winter, and asked us to send coats. And my MFSO friends did, until they had to find a storage place for the many, many boxes. I see a picture of her standing in the blowing snow with smiling children in only sweaters and sometimes barefoot. Her own three children were at home in Alaska. 

As a friend wrote to me recently, if you have a loved one in the military and dare proposing peace, you get a double whammy. You get criticized by many in the peace movement because your loved one is in the military, and then you are criticized by those believe you are undermining the morale of the troops by protesting the war.

The constant fear, 24/7, that harm will come to our family members will wrap around your heart until you feel sometimes you cannot breathe. When a loved one shares the deepest wounds, it is doubly painful. Painful that they are experiencing this, and painful that you can do nothing about it.

Here are the words of one of our MFSO sons:

The weather here is cooling off a bit, but Ramadaan has brought an increased level of bullshit in our area. I’m so angry. Angry isn’t the right word, but it’s simple. We’ve had a busy week. A busy week. Snipers, IEDs, EFPs, Mortars. I’ve seen the medevac chopper land in our compound three or four seperate times, and it starts to take it’s toll. Chunks of flesh. What the hell is chunks of flesh? Disgusting. Bones coming out of the body. Blood soaked stretchers. The cries in the darkness of grown men. I saw a grown man come up behind his buddy and hold him like sweethearts do. He rested his chin on the shoulder of his friend, and they wept together. What is this all about? I’m confused. I’m angry. And, I’m fighting a war on two fronts. One is plenty enough for one man to handle.

I’m still alive. Still here and counting the days. I miss you…

His mother went on to write:

This is what my son wrote to me today.

Now, the other “war” he is fighting is at home — where his wife has developed a “relationship” with an old love.

This brings up another issue — the effect of multiple deployments on the families. This is typical of several emails I have received from MFSO members:

Since everyone has a divorce story you can add my son. His divorce will be final in July… My daughter-in-law told me he had changed so much when he came back the first time but she was willing to stick with it. Now I have to wonder how much more his personality will have altered when he comes back from this second trip.

He still tells me he loves me and calls me mama so there is still some of my precious son in there, but until we are face to face, I will be left to wonder.

The entire family is affected when someone is deployed. Those who are affected most of all are the Gold Star families — -those who have lost a loved one. From one of our Ohio Gold star members:

I know my brother was murdered by his own government – first for getting him into an illegal war that should never have happened, and, second, for not giving him the equipment and tools to do the job they’d given him.

Every time one of our rights or freedoms is ripped away from us, it hurts more because I know my brother dedicated his adult life to making sure we had them. He loved the ideal of service to his country, as most soldiers do. To give up what he was willing to die for is a slap in his face and is a tear on mine.

It hurts to tell people that he’s dead. Saying the words is an acknowledgement, a dagger to any fantasy you might have about where he is and what he’s doing that you use to get by.

No, the pain doesn’t diminish. You just learn to live all over again. Thank goodness for my support network – family, friends and other military and Gold Star families – who help keep my knees from buckling and my heart from giving up.

To us Gold Stars, I think, it often feels like the whole world is walking by and ignoring this pain.

In Loving Memory of US Army SSG Edward W. Carman
Nov. 1976 – Apr.2004

As Military families, we stand to lose more from this failed war than any one other than the Iraqis, whose deaths and casualties and suffering goes unnoticed even more than the sacrifice of our own troops. More than 40 Iraqi refugees have been settled in Dayton since January, and I listen to the stories of their suffering with great sadness until I think my own heart can no longer hold any more pain. And you know who has really stepped up more than any other group to really help and support these refugees in our community? It has been veterans and military families.

Military families’ and veterans’ voices are an asset to the movement BECAUSE we have so much to lose — those we love. We will never grow bored with this fight or move on to other issues.
We will never give up this struggle. Support the troops — bring them home now!

Today’s seventh annual conference on Ballot Access and Voting Integrity is intended by its founder Attorney General John Ashcroft to train US Attorneys about the perils of individual voters, mostly Democrats and minorities, cheating at the ballot box. The past six conferences have reflected the Justice Department’s shift from protecting voting rights to prosecuting supposed “voting fraud.”

“Attorney General Michael Mukasey has an opportunity today to refute the perversion of his agency’s mission” said Brett Bursey, Director of the SC Progressive Network, which work on voting rights. “Under the Bush Administration, the focus of the Justice Department has been a punitive effort against supposed voter fraud, as opposed to the historical role of the department to insure voter access to the polls.”

A recent study by the Brennan Center of the NY School of Law found that individual voter fraud (the type the Justice Department is focusing on) is “less likely than being struck by lightning while waiting in line to vote.” The Director of the SC Election Commission recently told a State House Judiciary subcommittee hearing a bill that would require additional ID to register to vote that she did not know of a single case of individual voter fraud in South Carolina.

Bursey reported a clear case of voter suppression to the Voting Section during the 2004 election. “I got the guy on the phone who had approved the Section 5 move of a precinct in Beaufort County from a fire station to a gated community. Voters had to go past a private security guard to get to the polling place. If your name wasn’t on the precinct list, they wouldn’t let you in, which violated the statute that lets one vote a provisional ballot. They don’t allow pedestrians, so you had to have a car to vote. The Section 5 attorney told me he wouldn’t have approved moving the precinct if he knew it was a gated community. I asked him if he would put that in writing so I could advise County Election Directors not to locate polling places in gated communities and he refused. I was later told by former Voting Section staff Dr. Toby Moore that the remaining staff was afraid to do anything that might anger their partisan bosses.”

More than half of the career employees of the Voting Rights Section of the Justice Department have resigned since 2005, citing ethical conflicts arising from the politicization of their jobs. Moore, who resigned from the Section in 2006, told a US House Judiciary Subcommittee last October, “Until someone in the Department, in this administration or the next, admits to the mistakes of the past several years and restores credible leadership, the Voting Section of Civil Rights Division will remain a wounded institution. That ultimately harms not only employees of the Voting Section and minority voters, but all Americans.”

“The Justice Department’s focus on ‘voting integrity’ has been exposed as a partisan effort to suppress Democratic votes,” Bursey said, “and we are looking to Attorney General Mukasey to put a stop to it.”