Non-violent Resistance is not a method for cowards; it does resist -Martin Luther King Jr., Principles of Non-Violent Resistance

On Monday, Sept. 25, I got arrested for misdemeanor willful trespass at the office of RI senator Jack Reed, along with 10 other members of the AFSC and Military Families Speak Out. We (the 11 of us driven to bear moral witness to the Declaration of Peace inside Sen. Reed's office, including Stephany Kurn, mother of a RI soldier who died in Iraq) left the Providence AFSC office at 9 for Cranston. Reed's office is in a shopping mall, basically, in a separate bulding from most of the retailers but shared with a mortgage place and Bank of America. We got into the office a little before ten and had a meeting with the senator's chief of staff promptly, who explained that the senator appreciated our witness and support and shared our views but would not be taking action on our "petition" today. When we met with the senator himself, Reed was very courteous in answering our questions and talking about his position but didn't seem to have read the declaration or our letters, though his correspondence with him suggested he had. Mrs. Kurn asked him directly what was keeping him from doing what he thought was right, since there were thousands of our soldiers dead there and the Iraqis obviously don't want us there anymore. He said that he was doing what he thought was right, and that he was confident in his approach and would talk with us again in October after his trip to Iraq to talk with the American commanders there. Mrs. Kurn expressed pessimism after he left about the prospects of the American officers sharing accurate assessments with him due to pressure from above in the ranks and from the Pentagon.

After the senator left things moved a little more slowly for a while, as in the next 7 and a half hours were spent in the waiting room, talking quietly with one another (one of the other guys there went to the GTU in Berkeley that Starr-King [the ministry school I'd like to go to] is part of and one of the support people outside is a minister at the Bell St. UU church and an S-K grad), reading from various academic and spiritual texts, and listening to his receptionist answer the phone (it was really funny and affirming at the end of the day when the chief of staff came back and asked us to leave to hear the answering machine click on in the background and have someone leave a message in support of the DOP).

At the end of the day (5:30), they informed us they were closing up shop and we were being asked to leave. When we told the chief of staff our intention was to stay until the DOP was signed he ended up calling the police (i felt bad for him, i'm sure he wanted to go home too) and they came and milled around for a while and tried to convince us it wasn't worth getting arrested and would take up too much of Cranston PD's manpower and eventually placed us all under arrest. They tried to convince us it would be just as symbolic to have one person arrested as 11, and we later found out that Reed's national office had called to try and pressure that outcome. Once we had made it clear we were all going to get arrested they frisked us and loaded us into paddywagons to go to the courthouse/police station. Since we weren't presenting any threat and had been really nice about it they let us hang out in the courtroom instead of in the cells, so that wasn't too bad. They also brought in Burger King for everyone and since there were a bunch of vegetarians I ended up having 4 hamburgers. They took everyone's info and fingerprinted us all and then gave us citations to appear on Oct. 18 and let us go.

Some people have asked why we were trying to persuade a Democrat who's been against the war since the beginning, instead of a pro-war Republican. Our reasoning was that Sen. Reed has a lot of clout in the senate as a veteran and member of the Armed Services Committee, and is already moving in the right direction. However, he has been riding the fact that he voted against the war in the first place and not taking the necessary but politically unpopular step of stating the need for a concrete timeline for withdrawal from Iraq. Our goal was to support him in taking that step either in the form of signing the DOP or sponsoring legislation that would create such a timeline. Unfortunate he decided not to do take that step when we were there, so they had to arrest us to get us to leave. Further reasons for our witness were articulated by Ingrid O'Brien in a Brown Daily Herald column.