In April of 2004, the first photographs from inside Abu Ghraib appeared in the US media. The photos showed Iraqi prisoners being tortured, abused and humiliated by US forces and private contractors.
While the first photos were broadcast on 60 Minutes and published in the pages of The New Yorker, the initial reports of torture actually came months earlier. Beginning in 2003, members of the Christian Peacemaker Team in Iraq began documenting dozens of cases of torture and abuse of Iraqi prisoners inside US military facilities.
Peace activists, Peggy and Art Gish are longtime members of the Christian Peacemaker Team. Peggy Gish has worked in Iraq with Christian Peacemaker Teams since October of 2002. She helped document the first reports of abuse inside US prisons in Iraq. Her husband, Art Gish, has been part of the Christian Peacemaker Teams in the West Bank since 1995.
Peggy Gish, “We started this work in the summer of 2003, and what—it grew out of just helping the Iraqi families that had people detained among their family. And then we began discovering gross abuse in all of the prisons of Iraq, not just Abu Ghraib. And there was a lot of brutality from the very beginning of the house raid in the middle of the night, where soldiers acknowledged that they had thirty seconds or forty seconds of absolute terror to subdue the people, and then brutality in the questioning, the interrogation process, torture going on in that process, as well as in the imprisonment time. So we were hearing stories from men and women who had been in Abu Ghraib and other prisons, and we compiled a report on seventy-two prisoners that became part of a pool of evidence, and we were one of several organizations, Iraqi and international groups, that put tremendous pressure on the system to make it public.
I go Iraq because I’ve been given a deep love for the Iraqi people, and love is really what has overcome the fear that I have to struggle with when I go there, but also because I am from a country that has done tremendous damage to their society, to the people, devastated the lives and culture of a people, and I want to do some small part in trying to help the people of Iraq, but also to let the people here know what is really happening there. So part of our work is just truth telling, witnessing what the occupation has done, what that has meant for people.
And it has been a horrible thing for the people of Iraq. It has meant up to a million people killed, a continued physical devastation of the country. There’s still very little clean water or electricity, very poor medical care. People have been traumatized. Friends tell us that they are so despairing and depressed and do not see much hope for the future of their country, at least not for generations. And so, it is a devastated country. And people say, “I don’t feel like it’s getting better.”
I wish that Obama would be speaking out clearly, acknowledging the harm that the US has done there more clearly. And what we see and what Iraqis see is that Obama is just following in the same policies concerning Iraq that Bush has. The timetable for withdrawing is very similar to what Bush had put on the table. And they—I guess I’m afraid that he’s just being sucked into it, being pressured into a kind of aggressive military policy for dealing with the struggles of the world.
What’s happening with Iraq is now being transferred over into the work with Afghanistan, so we’re going to take troops from Iraq, but we’re going to increase the war there, the war on terror. And that is what we ought to be addressing, is our whole foreign policy, the way we are dealing with this whole problem of terrorism in the world.”
Art Gish, also a Christian Peacemaker, “Since 1995, I’ve been going to the West Bank every winter for three months. And I just came back from spending another three months there.
Christian Peacemaker Teams came out of the peace churches, the Quakers, the Mennonites, the Church of the Brethren, out of the idea that if we’re really serious about peace, we ought to be willing to take the same risks as soldiers take and go into a nonviolent—into violent situations and be a nonviolent presence there. What if people who want peace made the same kind of commitment that soldiers make?
That we go there, and we take risks, and we stand in the middle, and we work for peace in there.
The most important thing we do is listen. And we listen to all sides. We act as international observers. I like to say we have the grandmother effect. There are things nobody would do if their grandmother is watching. So, in any conflict anywhere in the world, it’s really important to have outside observers there who are a presence there, and the people know they’re being watched, and that will reduce the violence.
And then, third, we also engage in nonviolent direct action. If the Israeli military wants to demolish a Palestinian house, we’ll sit on the roof of the house. We stand in front of tanks and bulldozers, and our slogan is “getting in the way.””
Rachel Corrie’s death anniversary was on March 16th. She was killed in Gaza by an Israeli military bulldozer. She stood in front of a house standing to prevent it from being crushed.
Art Gish, ” I did some work for ISM. That’s the group she was working with, International Solidarity Movement. And I led the training for two days of nonviolence training for her, so I trained her to stand in front of bulldozers.
That touched me very deeply, since I have some responsibility in that. But she’s one of my heroes, of course. And, I think of the times I stood in front of tanks and bulldozers, and it could have happened to me.
In the main central produce market in Hebron, I saw two Israeli bulldozers, two Israeli tanks smashing the whole area. And a big tank came toward me, and I stood there, and it stopped, right in front of me. I didn’t realize that day that maybe I saved my wife’s life that day, because while she was kidnapped in Iraq, she showed a picture of me standing in front of the tank to the kidnappers, and they were quite impressed and said we’re going to let you go”.
Peggy Gish, “I had the photo with me and the photos of my family, my children, right, and showed that to them. And then they went out with it, and ten minutes later the guard came back in and said I would be released the next day with our translator.”
What drives you to devote so much time to this kind of activism?
Art Gish, ” first of all, it’s a privilege and a gift to be able to stand with the victims, with the oppressed of the world. That’s a privilege. I wouldn’t want to give it up for anything. What motivates us is our religious faith, our faith in God. And as Peggy put it so well, it’s love. It’s our love for the people that drives us”.
Art was born in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. Peggy in Nigeria. Her parents were working there when she was very young. And then grew up in Chicago.
Peggy Gish, “we started our activism with civil rights work, and it a just opened the door to all kinds of other issues for us. Then we became involved with the anti-Vietnam War protests and draft resistance, death penalty abolition. And so, we began to see the interconnection with so many oppressions and problems, economic problems, with the war machine. And then we heard about a group that had a different kind of response, one that would be of standing with people and working with them nonviolently within their countries in those situations.
And so, as we worked in Iraq, we looked for those creative people who were interested, and we did a training with a group of Shia Muslims in Karbala in 2005, and they became known then as the Muslim Peacemaker Teams. With them, then we went into the city of Fallujah seven times during the year of 2005 to work for reconciliation between Sunni and Shia. So that’s the kind of thing that we do. And it’s exciting because we’re a part of a movement of the local people who are doing that and building that up for their country”.
Peggy and Art Gish talking.
- from democracynow.org