Enemy Combatants: The War at Home

There was a startling moment in 2005 at the World Tribunal on Iraq in Istanbul. Arundhati Roy was delivering her closing speech as the chair of the international jury. We had been listening for three days as medical doctors, environmental engineers, historians, lawyers, Iraqi victims, human rights activists and others detailed the gross violations of (as Roy put it) "this huge, enormous bloody thing." Her last words were:

"...at the end of it, today we do seem to live in a world where the United States of America has defined an enemy combatant, someone whom they can kidnap from any country, from any place in the world and take for trial to the US. An enemy cambatant seems to be anybody who harbors thoughts of resistance. Well, if this is the definition, then I, for one, am an enemy combatant. Thank you."

Watching the violence perpetrated against demonstrators and journalists in Saint Paul, I realize that the war has indeed come home. We who resist are, in the eyes of Homeland Security, of the Saint Paul Police and Secret Service, enemy combatants.
We can be shot at at will. We can be gased at their discretion.
LIke our counterparts in Fallujah, and Basra, and Baghdad, our homes can be raided in the middle of the night. Our children, our sisters, our grandparents, our uncles and aunts, our colleagues, our dear friends can be hauled off and held for days without explanation or reason. Kicked, beaten, cuffed and even tortured.

We have to resist. The enemy is us.

Clips from Dario's Film on YouTube

When we were working on Shocking and Awful, my neighbor, poet Jeanine Vega, said she had an Italian friend who had given her a film he put together from images that he and others had shot in Iraq, before and during the invasion in 2003. He had tried to get it shown in the US, to no avail. I said, well it sounds like something we could include in the Shocking and Awful series. Dario Bellini sent it and it is the last of the 12 part series. Elvira posted a section of it on YouTube and it has had 11,900 viewers and generated a great deal of emotional response. You can see the comments on the YouTube site.