Mike Ferner

December 2, 2005

I half-suspected NPR to exhume Henry Kissinger (he is dead, isn’t he?) the other day when they did a promo about a story on “Iraqization,” but no, they spared us the sonorous tones of Doctor Strangelove, only to give us his pin-headed sidekick, former Nixon Defense Secretary, Melvin Laird.

Since it’s clearly too much to expect National Pentagon Radio to invite an eminent historian like Howard Zinn or someone of similar ability onto our airwaves to explain the likely pitfalls of Bush’s plan to hand over Iraq to our hand-picked Iraqis, it falls to the Itinerant Scribbler Corps to put Laird’s interview into historic perspective.

November 22, 2005
by Mike Ferner

Ft. Benning, Ga. — Sitting in a Georgia motel Saturday night, Kathy Kelly talked through a bad phone connection and a worse head cold to recount the previous day’s activities where she and 13 others were arrested at an airstrip outside Raleigh, North Carolina.

The tiny Johnson County Airport is home to Aero Contractors Corp., a firm described by the New York Times as “a major domestic hub of the Central Intelligence Agency’s secret air service” that shuttles prisoners abroad for interrogation and suspected torture. The Times reports Aero was founded in 1979 by the chief pilot for Air America, a CIA “front” in Vietnam.

November 12, 2005
by Mike Ferner

A rare moment of truth – several of them, actually – occurred at last week’s meeting of the Toledo Board of Education’s Policy Committee when school officials, peace activists and military recruiters assembled to discuss a draft policy to control recruiters in public schools.

Thanks to the federal No Child Left Unrecruited Act, kicking the snake oil salesmen out altogether was not on the table (frankly, I think the vast majority of school board officials around the country are glad “No Child Left Alone” gives them the political cover to tell peace activists “gee, we’d love to ban recruiters altogether, but the federal law, blah blah blah…”).

October 19, 2005
by Mike Ferner

Toledo — More than seventy-five local, state, and national organizations sent a letter today to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, and the Congressional oversight and appropriations committees for the Department of Defense (DOD), seeking an end to a data collecting project called the Joint Advertising and Market Research Studies (JAMRS) Recruiting Database.

Toledo’s Student and Family Rights and Privacy Committee, the group now pressuring Toledo Public Schools to restrict military recruiters, is in full support of this effort to end the JAMRS recruitment database because it violates the Privacy Act while collecting data on 30 million people ages 16 to 25 from a vast array of sources such as drivers license or selective service registrations. Other organizations from the Toledo area that have joined this nationwide effort include the Northwest Ohio Peace Coalition, Sylvania Franciscan Sisters, the Interfaith Justice and Peace Center, and the Toledo League of Pissed Off Voters.

September 30, 2005
by Mike Ferner

Having publicly raised the idea of turning the September 24 anti-war march in Washington into a sit-down, I feel obliged to report on what happened last weekend and ask what more will we do?

The column I wrote on that idea a couple days before the demonstration (“Will We Use the Power We Have on September 24th”) generated several email replies. All but one were supportive, generally along the lines that “the horrors we are perpetrating in Iraq call for the strongest non-violent response possible.” Keeping in mind the unscientific nature of my polling process, here’s what I learned from talking with as many people as I could on the way to Washington and while waiting in line for the march to begin the morning of the 24th.