"Don't get too big for your britches," a mother tells the Chicago girl, and 72 years later she's still holding power's feet to the proverbial fire!
This was me, Tipping Points, Spokane community radio, KYRS-FM, 19 years AGO? Scroll and find this interview with Kathy Kelly.
Better yet, she's on my Oregon radio show, Feb. 11, but you get to hear her now, ABOVE, an early bird special for all those 100.00 a year subscribers (NOT).
This interview was precipitated somewhat by her piece in the Progressive Magazine which ended up on the venue for which I have written = Dissident Voice.
Go Tell It on the Mountain: Genocide is Wrong . . . While Israel's genocide against Palestinians in Gaza continues, the Israeli government paves the way for a 'Gazafication' of the West Bank
She's even mostly honored quite well over at Wiki-CIA-Pedia:
Kathy Kelly is board president of World BEYOND War. From 2022 to 2024 she co-coordinated the Merchants of Death War Crimes Tribunal. Since the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan, she has co-coordinated an international network to assist young Afghans forced to flee their country. She made over two dozen trips to Afghanistan from 2010 - 2019, living with young Afghan Peace Volunteers in a working-class neighborhood in Kabul.
With Voices in the Wilderness companions, from 1996-2003, she traveled twenty-seven times to Iraq, defying the economic sanctions and remaining in Iraq throughout the Shock and Awe bombing and the initial weeks of the invasion. She joined subsequent delegations to the West Bank's Jenin Camp in 2002 during and after Israeli attacks, to Lebanon during the 2006 summer war between Israel and Hezbollah and to Gaza, in 2009, during Operation Cast Lead and following the 2013 Operation Pillar of Defense.
Kathy has been an educator for most of her life, but she believes children of war and those who are victims of violence have been her most important teachers.
Kathy Is the Real Deal! An eyewitness to the horrors of the US 'forever wars' speaks out,
Here own words 5 years ago! Below!
Editor's note: Kathy Kelly, a co-founder of Voices in the Wilderness, renamed Voices for Creative Nonviolence, is a peace activist who, from the start of the first Gulf War in 1991, has traveled to U.S. war zones. From Baghdad and Basra in Iraq to Kabul in Afghanistan, she sought to bridge the language of enemies and counter the violence with personal witness, often writing accounts that countered the misleading appraisals of U.S. officials. In light of the recent release of the Afghanistan Papers, NCR asked if she would reflect on her experience of America's "forever wars."
The 2003 "shock and awe" bombing of Iraq had finally stopped. From the balcony of my room in Baghdad's Al Fanar Hotel, I watched U.S. Marines moving between their jeeps, armored personnel carriers, and Humvees. They had occupied the street immediately in front of the small, family-owned hotel where our Iraq Peace Team had been living for the past six months. Looking upward, a U.S. Marine could see enlarged vinyl photos of beautiful Iraqi children strung across balconies of our fifth-floor rooms. We silently stood on those balconies when the U.S. Marines arrived in Baghdad, holding signs that said "War = Terror" and "Courage for Peace, Not for War." When she first saw the Marines' faces, Cynthia Banas commented on how young and tired they seemed. Wearing her "War Is Not the Answer" T-shirt, she headed down the stairs to offer them bottled water.
From my balcony, I saw Cathy Breen, also a member of the Iraq Peace Team, kneeling on a large canvas artwork entrusted to us by friends from South Korea. It depicts people suffering from war. Above the people, like a sinister cloud, is a massive heap of weapons. We unrolled it the day the Marines arrived and began to "occupy" this space. Marines carefully avoided driving vehicles over it. Sometimes they would converse with us. Below, Cathy read from a small booklet of daily Scripture passages. A U.S. Marine approached her, knelt, and apparently asked to pray with her. He placed his hands in hers.
April Hurley, of our team, is a doctor. She was greatly needed in the emergency room of a nearby hospital during the bombing. Drivers would only take her there if she was accompanied by someone they had known for a long time, and so I generally accompanied her. I'd often sit on a bench outside the emergency room while traumatized civilians rushed in with wounded and maimed survivors of the terrifying U.S. aerial bombings. When possible, Cathy Breen and I would take notes at the bedsides of patients, including children, whose bodies had been ripped apart by U.S. bombs.
The ER scenes were gruesome, bloody and utterly tragic. Yet no less unbearable and incomprehensible were the eerily quiet wards we had visited during trips to Iraq from 1996 to 2003, when Voices in the Wilderness had organized 70 delegations to defy the economic sanctions by bringing medicines and medical relief supplies to hospitals in Iraq. Across the country, Iraqi doctors told us the economic war was far worse than even the 1991 Desert Storm bombing.
In pediatrics wards, we saw infants and toddlers whose bodies were wasted from gastrointestinal diseases, cancers, respiratory infections and starvation. Limp, miserable, sometimes gasping for breath, they lay in the arms of their sorrowful mothers, and seemingly no one could stop the U.S. from punishing them to death. "Why?" mothers murmured. Sanctions forbade Iraq to sell its oil. Without oil revenues, how could they purchase desperately needed goods? Iraq's infrastructure continued to crumble; hospitals became surreal symbols of cruelty where doctors and nurses, bereft of medicines and supplies, couldn't heal their patients or ease their agonies.
In 1995, UN officials estimated that economic sanctions had directly contributed to the deaths of at least a half-million Iraqi children, under age 5.
Kathy Kelly with children in Kabul, Afghanistan, May 2016 (Provided photo)
The economic war continued for nearly 13 harsh and horrible years.
Shortly after the Marines arrived outside of our hotel, we began hearing ominous reports of potential humanitarian crises developing in Baghdad and other major Iraqi cities. A woman who had been in charge of food distribution for her neighborhood, under the "Oil for Food" program, showed us her carefully maintained ledger books and angrily asked how all who had depended on the monthly food basket would now feed their families. Along with food shortages, we heard alarming reports about contaminated water and a possible outbreak of cholera in Basra and Hilla. For weeks, there had been no trash removal. Bombed electrical plants and sanitation facilities had yet to be restored. Iraqis who could help restore the broken infrastructure couldn't make it through multiple check points to reach their offices; with communication centers bombed, they couldn't contact colleagues. If the U.S. military hadn't yet devised a plan for emergency relief, why not temporarily entrust projects to U.N. agencies with long experience of organizing food distribution and health care delivery?
Cathy, who is a nurse, Dr. April Hurley, and Ramzi Kysia, also a member of our group, arranged a meeting with the civil and military operations center, located in the Palestine Hotel, across the street from us. An official there dismissed them as people who didn't belong there. Before telling them to leave, he did accept a list of our concerns, written on Voices in the Wilderness stationery.
The logo for our stationery reappeared a few hours later, at the entrance to the Palestine Hotel. It was taped to the flap of a cardboard box. Surrounding the logo were seven silver bullets. Written in ball-point pen on the cardboard was a message: "Keep Out."
In response, Ramzi Kysia wrote a press release headlined: "Heavy-handed & Hopeless, The U.S. Military Doesn't Know What It's Doing In Iraq."
Kathy Kelly holds Shoba at the Chamin-E-Babrak refugee camp in Kabul, Afghanistan, in January 2014, a few days after the child had been saved from a burning tent, during a fire that destroyed much of the camp. (Abdulhai Darya)
In 2008, our group, renamed Voices for Creative Nonviolence, was beginning a walk from Chicago to the Republican National Convention in Minneapolis. We asked Imam Abdul Malik Mujahid to speak at a "send-off" event. He encouraged and blessed our "Witness Against War" walk but then surprised us by saying he had never heard us mention the war in Afghanistan, even though people there suffered terribly from aerial bombings, drone attacks, targeted assassinations, night raids and imprisonments. Returning from our walk, we began researching drone warfare, and then created an "Afghan Atrocities List," on our website, carefully updating it each week with verifiable reports of U.S. attacks against Afghan civilians.
The following year, Joshua Brollier and I headed to Pakistan and then Afghanistan. In Kabul, Afghanistan, we were guests of a deeply respected non-governmental organization Emergency, which has a Surgical Centre for War Victims there.
Filippo, a sturdy young nurse from Italy who was close to completing three terms of service with Emergency, welcomed us. As he filled a huge backpack with medicines and supplies, he described how the hospital personnel managed to reach people in remote villages who have no access to clinics or hospitals. The trip was relatively safe since no one had ever attacked a vehicle marked with the Emergency logo. A driver would take him to one of Emergency's 41 remote first aid clinics. From there, he would hike further up a mountainside and meet villagers awaiting him and the precious medicines he carried. In a previous visit, after he had completed a term in Afghanistan, he said people had walked four hours in the snow to come and say goodbye to him. "Yes," he said, "I fell in love."
How different Filippo's report was from those compiled in our Afghan Atrocities List. The latter tells about U.S. special operations forces, some of the most highly trained warriors in the world, traveling to remote areas, bursting into homes in the middle of the night, and proceeding to lock the women in one room, handcuff or sometimes hogtie the men, rip apart closets, mattresses and furniture, and then take the men to prisons for interrogation. Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch filed chilling reports about torture of Afghan prisoners held by the U.S.
In 2010, two U.S. Veterans for Peace, Ann Wright and Mike Ferner, joined me in Kabul. We visited one of the city's largest refugee camps. People faced appalling conditions. Over a dozen, including infants, had frozen to death, their families unable to purchase fuel or adequate blankets. When the rain, sleet and snow came, the tents and huts become mired in mud. Earlier, I had met with a young girl there whose arm had been cut off, her uncle told me, by a U.S. drone attack. Her brother, whose spine was injured, huddled under a blanket, inside their tent, visibly shaking.
Opposite the sprawling refugee camp is a huge U.S. military base. Ann and Mike felt outraged over the terrible contrast between the Afghan refugee camp with a soaring population of people displaced by war, and the U.S. base housing military personnel who had ample supplies of food, water, and fuel.
Most of the funds earmarked by the U.S. for reconstruction in Afghanistan have been used to train and equip Afghan Defense and Security forces. My young friends in the Afghan Peace Volunteers (APV) were weary of war and didn't want military training. Each of them had lost friends and family members because of the war.
In December 2015, I again visited Emergency's Surgical Centre for War Victims in Kabul, joined by several Afghan Peace Volunteers. We donated blood and then visited with hospital personnel. "Are you still treating any victims of the U.S. bombing in Kunduz?" I asked Luca Radaelli, who coordinates Emergency's Afghan facilities. He explained how their Kabul hospital was already full when 91 survivors of the U.S. attack on the Kunduz hospital operated by Médecins Sans Frontières were transported for five hours over rough roads to the closest place they could be treated, this surgical center. The Oct. 15 attack had killed at least 42 people, 14 of whom were hospital staff.
Related: Afghanistan: To some Catholic experts, the lies are no surprise
Kathy Kelly and Voices in the Wilderness delegation with Afghan Peace Volunteer friends in Bamyan, Afghanistan, in 2010 (Hakim Young)
Even though Kunduz hospital staff had immediately notified the U.S. military, the U.N., and the Afghan government that the U.S. was bombing their hospital, the warplane continued bombing the hospital's ER and intensive care unit, in 15-minute intervals, for an hour and a half.
Luca introduced our small team to Khalid Ahmed, a former pharmacy student at the Kunduz hospital, who was still recovering. Khalid described the terrible night, his attempt to literally run for his life by sprinting toward the front gate, his agony when he was hit by shrapnel in his spine, and his efforts to reassemble his cell phone -- guards had cautioned him to remove the batteries so that he wouldn't be detected by aerial surveillance -- so that he could give a last message to his family, as he began to lose consciousness. Fortunately, his call got through. His father's relatives raced to the hospital's front gate and found Khalid in a nearby ditch, unconscious but alive.
Telling his story, Khalid asked the Afghan Peace Volunteers about me. Learning I'm from the U.S., his eyes widened. "Why would your people want to do this to us?" he asks. "We were only trying to help people."
Images of battered and destroyed hospitals in Iraq and Afghanistan, and of hospital personnel trying nevertheless to heal people and save lives, help me retain a basic truth about U.S. wars of choice: We don't have to be this way.
Admittedly, it's difficult to uproot entrenched systems, like the military-industrial-congressional-media-Washington, D.C., complex, which involves corporate profits and government jobs. Mainstream media seldom help us recognize ourselves as a menacing, warrior nation. Yet we must look in the mirror held up by historical circumstances if we're ever to accomplish credible change.
The recently released "Afghanistan Papers" criticize U.S. military and elected officials for misleading the U.S. public by covering up disgraceful military failures in Afghanistan. Pentagon officials were quick to dismiss the critiques, assuring an easily distracted U.S. public that the documents won't impact U.S. military and foreign policy. Two days later, UNICEF reported that more than 600 Afghan children had died in 2019, because of direct attacks in the war. From 2009 through 2018, almost 6,500 children lost their lives in this war.
Addressing the U.S. Senate and Congress during a visit to Washington, D.C., Pope Francis voiced a simple, conscientious question. "Why are deadly weapons being sold to those who plan to inflict untold suffering on individuals and society?" Answering his own question, he said: "the answer, as we all know, is simply for money: money that is drenched in blood, often innocent blood."
What are the lessons learned from the rampage, destruction and cruelty of U.S. wars? I believe the most important lessons are summed up in the quote on Cynthia Banas's T-shirt as she delivered water to Marines in Baghdad, in April, 2003: "War Is Not the Answer"; and in an updated version of the headline Ramzi Kysia wrote that same month: "Heavy-handed & Hopeless, The U.S. Military Doesn't Know What It's Doing" -in Iraq, Afghanistan or any of its "forever wars."
[Kathy Kelly co-coordinates Voices for Creative Nonviolence. While in Kabul, she is a guest of the Afghan Peace Volunteers.]
Sickness? These are diseased people, whom I call neuroperverse.
Israeli occupation Far-Right Lawmakers Spark Outrage by Wearing Noose-Shaped Pins Ahead of Debate on Executing Palestinian Prisoners.
The image circulated by local media shows several members of a right-wing parliamentary bloc arriving at the Knesset wearing gold lapel pins shaped like a hanging rope. The symbolic accessory was displayed ahead of a legislative discussion on a proposed law concerning the execution of Palestinian prisoners. The gesture immediately sparked controversy, with critics describing it as a provocation and an alarming endorsement of harsh punitive measures.
Human rights groups and Palestinian officials condemned the act, saying it reflects an escalating political climate that encourages incitement and dehumanization. They argue that such symbolism, especially inside the parliament, signals a dangerous shift toward normalizing extreme policies rather than pursuing legal and humanitarian standards. The incident has fueled further debate over the proposed bill and intensified concerns about the direction of policymaking toward Palestinians under detention.
How many people in my circle, in those Holocaust Harris Voting circles, have heard of Kathy and this bloody report?
Jump into it NOW:
On January 15, 2025, the Merchants of Death War Crimes Tribunal held a press conference announcing the verdicts of the jurors as to the guilt or innocence of U.S. weapons makers in the commission of war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide. Several of the jurors spoke at this press conference.
Additional links & resources from the press conference:
Tried in abstentia, and found guilty of war crimes:
The above listed CEOs could be prosecuted outside the U.S. under the well-established doctrine of universal jurisdiction. A Human Rights Watch paper titled "The Pinochet Precedent- How Victims Can Pursue Human Rights Criminals Abroad" explains: "[t]his is the principle that every state has an interest in bringing to justice the perpetrators of particular crimes of international concern, no matter where the crime was committed, and regardless of the nationality of the perpetrators or their victims."
[This Tribunal further concludes that the defendants are guilty of violating numerous domestic U.S. laws, as detailed in the following report. Lastly, this Tribunal makes numerous recommendations to repair, reform, and restructure U.S. foreign policy and eliminate the corporate takeover of U.S. foreign policy and its warmaking power.]
Six years ago:
What a difference an overtly coveted genocide makes: 'A big shock': the Israeli startup helping ultra-Orthodox Jews enter the world of hi-tech work
Entrepreneurs want Haredi men, many of whom live in poverty, to have access to the opportunities of Tel Aviv
Merchants of war a la Talmud....
The war criminals are PROUD: The Israeli and Jewish contributions to artificial intelligence
The Jewish contribution to AI's long development has been considerable and continues to this day, along with the collaboration between AI scientists in Israel and those abroad.
Not very Yiddish or Hebrew of them: Israeli startup Landscape Maps
New monsters on the war crimes block: Tech founders dominate Forbes magazine's billionaire list . . . The boom in tech stocks has made people like Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg multibillionaires, followed by the founders of Twitter, Snap and WhatsApp. The Forbes 400 list provides an annual score...
Kathy mentioned the technology, the AI, how all those journalists and doctors were targeted in Gaza? TECH monsters:
Kathy sees a glimmer of hope in "the" young people and in actions like the so-called flotilla movement:
She gives high praise to Greta and Thiago.
It is daunting how pervasive the military industrial complex is -- Hollywood, education, mining, energy, oil, banking, finance, retail, media, PR, entertainment, sports, AI-VR-MR-VR, engineering, policing, prisons, surveillance, transportation, medicine, pharma, chemicals . . . Congress . . . culture . . . psychology!
Merchants of Death War Tribunal: This Tribunal was also presented with evidence of the historic background of the defendants of using the U.S. military to further their corporate interests across the globe. The evidence included original U.S. Senate hearings conducted by Senator Gerald Nye in the 1930s that examined whether U.S. business interests had led the United States into World War I to increase corporate profits.
The evidence presented indicates a long-standing influence of U.S. corporations within the United States' foreign policy and defense apparatus. This influence has often resulted in the use of U.S. troops to intervene in foreign countries for the advancement of corporate interests. Detailed evidence was also presented concerning the funding of "think tanks" by these defendants for the purpose of manipulating a pro-war narrative in the mainstream media and in the U.S. Congress. Relatedly, detailed evidence was presented establishing the fact that the defendants intentionally hired and placed their representatives within mainstream media, the Pentagon, lobbying firms, academic institutions, and "think tanks" for the purpose of creating a pro-war narrative which would result in the U.S. government purchasing large amounts of weapons from these defendants.
The abovementioned actions by the defendants have resulted in the loss to U.S taxpayers of some $8 trillion1 since the Wars on Terror began on September 11, 2001, a loss that was transferred into huge wealth in the bank accounts of the defendants.
1 Kimball, J. (2021, September 1). Costs of the 20-year war on terror: $8 trillion and 900,000 deaths. Brown University.
Christian Sorensen's map shows where the six weapons manufacturers -- Lockheed Martin, RTX, Northrop Grumman, Boeing, General Dynamics, and L3Harris -- are located across the U.S. The map summarizes what each facility currently works on and suggests peaceful, beneficial fields toward which production could immediately pivot.
She's on the frontlines: Norman Solomon's 'War Made Invisible' Refutes Collusion with War Makers . . . New book asks why people often identify more with the bombers rather than with the bombed.
Fucking TED Talk: Merchants of WAR. And so here we have it -- Orwellian double and triple speak: Anduril's Palmer Luckey makes an ethical case for using AI in war: 'There is no moral high ground in using inferior technology'
Listen to Kathy and me cover a lot of ground. She was gracious enough to submit to my mosaic mind and rough exterior.
Amazon Dot SUCKS. Or email me and I will get you a copy for, well, $29 with my signature.