20 |  COMMENTARY |

THURSDAY, MAY 7, 2009
CHICAGO SUN-TIMES

CHICAGO SUN-TIMES___AN INDEPENDENT NEWSPAPER _______________

It's time to listen to the voices of peace







____________________  		____________________




__________DON TERRY

T  he next time the producers
        of television and radio news
        gear up to cover an Ameri-
can war, they should try some-
thing new.
    Give peace a chance.
    Then someone like three-time
Nobel Peace Prize nominee Kathy
Kelly would get airtime, along
with the retired generals, admi-
rals and assorted old warriors
who typically blitz the airwaves in
times of military conflict.
    If we had even halfway heeded
the Kathy Kellys of this world, the
nation might have paused before
blasting into Iraq, chasing phan-
tom weapons of mass destruction.
    Instead, the men of war had the
microphones to themselves.
    Last month, David Barstow
won a Pulitzer Prize for a story in
the New York Times headlined
"Behind TV Analysts, Pentagon's
Hidden Hand.''
    The Pulitzer board said the
story "revealed how some retired
generals, working as radio and
television analysts, had been co-
opted by the Pentagon to make its
case for the war in Iraq, and how
many of them also had undisclosed
ties to companies that benefitted
from policies they defended.''
    I've been a newspaper man for
nearly 30 years, working in news- 		rooms from the Chicago Defender
to the Chicago Sun-Times to the
New York Times. The sad truth
is that newspapers don't give the
peace movement much coverage
or respect. We look for the wacki-
est demonstrator to quote, prefer-
ably the guy dressed as Uncle
Sam in drag.
    We have to do a lot better.
    "It's important for people in the
United States to hear an alterna-
tive view to that presented in the
mainstream media,'' Kelly told
me the other day, shortly after
returning to Chicago from Wash-
ington, where she spent a night in
jail for a peace demonstration in
front of the White House.
    She has been arrested dozens
of times for peace protests.
    A lifelong Chicagoan, Kelly,
56, is no armchair peacenik. She
has been a "witness for peace" in
some of the hottest war zones of
the last 20 years.
    She was in Iraq in 1991 during
the first Gulf War, in Sarajevo in
1992 during the Bosnian war and
back in Iraq in 2003, hunkered
down in a hotel on the Tigris River
as "shock and awe'' rained down
from U.S. bombers and missiles.
    Earlier this year, she bore wit-
ness in Gaza as Israeli warplanes
laid siege to the forces of Hamas.
    As always happens in war,
innocent civilians were caught
in the middle, many of them
women and children and elderly.
    Kelly took her place next to
them.
    "There was no government
that spoke up on behalf of the
Gazans,'' she says.
    For three of the nights she was
there, she says, "every 11 minutes 		a bomb fell from 11 p.m. to 1:30
a.m. The wreckage and destruc-
tion was really horrific.''
    What's so often missing from
the coverage of our wars, Kelly
says, is the view from the people
on the other end of the gun.
    "I have this stubborn feeling,''
she says, "that when crimes
against humanity are being com-
mitted, it's good to have witnesses
on the ground to write about that,
to speak about it.''
    So no one should be surprised
if Kelly shows up someday soon
on the Pakistan/Afghanistan bor-
der, where U.S. Predator drones
have killed more than a dozen
senior al-Qaida leaders and hun-
dreds of civilians by mistake in
the last four years, according to
recent news reports.
    "There's a pattern,'' she says.
"There's an announcement of a
U.S. drone attack against a mili-
tant stronghold. But it's really not
that infrequent that a few days
later you learn that civilians were
killed. It was a mistake. It wasn't
a stronghold. It was a police sta-
tion. A wedding. A birthday party.''
    She sighs and says that she is
more hopeful now that "we can
slow America's impulse to go to
war'' because "the difference is
that we now have a thoughtful
and reflective person in the Oval
Office.''
    That's true, I say, but President
Obama plans to continue and
even step up the drone attacks
that President Bush started.
    Kelly sighs again. This time it is
deeper.
    She knows she will be going
back to jail.