Category: Voices & Weekend Voices

Executive Producer/Editor/Host: Amy Browne
Audio recorded/contributed by John Greenman
Topic: Father Roy Bourgeois, founder of SOA Watch, speaking in Maine
Over the years WERU has reported extensively—here on Voices, as well as on RadioActive—on efforts to close the School of the Americas, also known as the school of the assassins. The school is located at Ft. Benning, in Georgia, and in recent years the name has been changed to the Western Hemisphere Institute on Security Cooperation, but critics see that as mere “newspeak”. Soldiers from Latin America that have received training at the school have returned to their countries and committed notorious atrocities, including assassinations, killing civilians and church workers, and engaging in military coups—most recently in Honduras.

In the 1980s SOA graduates engaged in a reign of terror in El Salvador, and drew international attention when they murdered several Priests and their staff, and raped and murdered nuns and Catholic workers. Two of the nuns were friends of Father Roy Bourgeois, a Vietnam Veteran who worked with the poor, in the tradition of Liberation Theology, in Bolivia. In 1990, Father Roy, as he is known, founded the “School of the Americas Watch”, and he has worked tirelessly since that time to make the crimes of the school’s graduates known, and to convince the U.S. government to close it down. With legislation in Congress that may make that goal closer to reality than ever, Father Roy Bourgeois spoke at the University of Maine on Thursday. His talk was sponsored by Maine Peace Action Committee at the University of Maine, UMaine’s Peace and Reconciliation Program, the Peace and Justice Center of Eastern Maine, the Jim Harney chapter of Veterans for Peace, PICA (Peace through InterAmerican Community Action), the UMaine Office of Multicultural Programs, Pax Christi, and Peace Action Maine. He’s introduced by Doug Allen of the University’s Department of Philosophy, and local peace and justice groups.
More information about School of the Americas Watch, the legislation to close the school, and the annual vigil that draws thousands every November, is available at www.soaw.org Be sure to also check WERU’s audio archives for reports on this issue that have aired on RadioActive and Voices over the years.

Executive Producer/Host: Amy Browne
Contributing Producer: Larry Dansinger

Segment 1: Larry Dansinger talks with Vicki McCarty, an organizer who recently attended a conference in Kentucky, focusing on economic human rights. FMI: region3@ccsm.org or 207-687-6033

Segment 2: Amy Browne talks with Bob St. Peter of “Food for Maine’s Future”, for a report back from the recent La Via Campesina Youth Conference in Mexico, and an update on the work of small farmers who are organizing themselves internationally. FMI: www.foodformainesfuture.org

Executive Producer/Host: Amy Browne
Contributing Producers: Chris Covert, Meredith DeFrancesco
Segment 1: Chris Covert talking with Topher Hamblett of the Foundation for West Africa’s Community Radio Project. FMI: www.tfwa.org
Segment 2: Meredith DeFrancesco with a report on a Labor Day celebration for a good cause–she speaks with Steve Husson of Food AND Medicine

Executive Producer/Host: Amy Browne
Contributing Producers: Alex Kelly, Whitney Klamm, Haley Burns, Tiffany Rideout, Colleen Gilley, Will Whitham, Kate Wypyski and Ryan Lad

Topic: “Listen To This: Recording Stories of Bangor’s Homeless” — excerpts of interviews conducted by area youth at the Bangor Area Homeless Shelter this summer, under the guidance of Alex Kelly. The interviews are now part of Bangor Public Library’s permanent archive.

Executive Producer/Host: Amy Browne
Contributing Producers: Eric T. Olson, Jim Campbell, Carolyn Coe

Segment 1: The Peace and Justice Center of Eastern Maine held an event commemorating the 64th anniversary of the two nuclear bombings of civilian populations in Hiroshima, Japan on August 6, 1945 and Nagasaki on August 9. Eric T. Olson brings us some of the sounds from the event, which took place outside the Bangor Public Library on August 6th, 2009. Several members of the Peace and Justice Center participated.
Center Coordinator Ilze Petersons introduced the program. FMI about the Hiroshima/Nagasaki commemoration and the Unforgettable Fire slide show is available at www.peacectr.org.

Segment 2: When people walk up Main Street in Belfast, Maine, population about 6700, as they look into the window of the Old Professor’s Bookshop, they may find themselves imagining that they’ve somehow been transported to Harvard Square or Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley or Greenwich Village or some other large urban area with a large population and many universities.

In the shop windows, they’ll find themselves looking at displays of books focused on things like the French Revolution; or The Dynamics of Color from artistic, scientific, and psychological perspectives; or the History of Islam; or the 200th birthday of Charles Darwin and Abraham Lincoln, who, oddly enough, were born on the same day.

The WERU listening area is blessed with many fine independent bookstores but there is only one that divides its interior space into two categories: “What Is” and “What Matters.”

Jim Campbell stopped in to find out what why those categories and what brought such a store to Belfast. He talks with George Siscoe, the Old Professor of the Old Professor’s Bookshop.

Segment 3: Carolyn Coe reports on CodePink’s meeting with members of the Palestinian Legislative Council. This was recorded just prior to Obama’s speech in Cairo in early June of this year, in which he said “So let there be no doubt: the situation for the Palestinian people is intolerable. America will not turn our backs on the legitimate Palestinian aspiration for dignity, opportunity, and a state of their own.” FMI: www.gazafreedommarch.org

Cathy Melio’s “Artist’s Voice” feature

Producer/Host: Amy Browne

Chris Hedges, Pulitzer prize-winning journalist and author of seven books, including the most recent: Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle, spoke to a full house at the Deer Isle Reach Auditorium on August 13, at an event Sponsored by Island Peace and Justice and Deer Isle/Stonington High School Adult Education, and co-sponsored by WERU. For those of you who missed it, we bring you his talk today, slightly edited for length. Local award-winning artist Robert Shetterly, who has painted a portrait of Hedges as part of his “Americans Who Tell the Truth” series, does the introduction.
Hedges was an early and vocal critic of the Bush Administration’s plan to invade Iraq, calling the pro-war press coverage of the lead-up to the invasion “shameful cheerleading.” After the invasion he continued to speak out and chose to leave The New York Times, after more than 15 years, rather than be censored by its editors. Shortly thereafter he wrote perhaps his most well-known book, War Is the Force That Gives Us Meaning, which was a finalist for the 2003 National Book Critics Circle Award for nonfiction.
The son of a Presbyterian minister, Mr. Hedges has a B.A. in English Literature from Colgate University and a Master of Divinity from the Harvard School of Divinity. Today he is a Senior Fellow at The Nation Institute and Anschutz Distinguished Fellow at Princeton University. He contributes articles to numerous print publications and also writes a weekly column for truthdig.com.

Producer/Host: Amy Browne

In recent days the activist community in this part of Maine has been abuzz with reports that a federal grand jury has been convened in Bangor, and may be investigating local activists. We have been able to confirm the existence of a federal grand jury, and some information that indicates that it may be focusing on at least one person who has ties to the activist community. So far the parties involved have not come forward publicly. James McCarthy, the U.S. Assistant Attorney who issued the subpoena, has refused to answer our questions.

The Federal Grand Jury process has been used extensively in other parts of the US— most notably as part of the “Green Scare” witch hunt against environmental activists in the western states. Whether local activists are being targeted or not, attorneys who have dealt with this issue say it’s important to know your rights should someone knock on YOUR door with a subpoena. Today we’ll be focusing on that issue as we talk with Lauren Regan, an attorney who has represented many Green Scare clients through this process, and local attorneys Phil Worden and Lynne Williams, who have represented many of Maine’s activists.

FMI:
Lauren Regan, Attorney, Executive Director of The Civil Liberties Defense Center (CLDC), www.cldc.org
Lynne Williams, Attorney, Executive Vice President of the National Lawyer’s Guild, (207) 288-8485
Phil Worden, Attorney, National Lawyer’s Guild, (207) 276-3318