Wheels of Justice

Bea Dewing’s impressive resume shows more than a life’s work: her professional background includes work as a community organizer working on housing, a data analyst and software developer, a café owner, a cable TV producer, and various forms of civil service. In addition, Dewing worked for both the U.S. Department of Defense and the Department of Labor. Dewing holds degrees in computer science and government and politics.

From housing activism and advocacy to local peace group coordinating and environmental activism to organizing a support group for abused women, Bea Dewing’s resume as a peace and human rights activist is too long to list.

In 2003, In Palestine, Bea Dewing accompanied Palestinian farmers, medical workers, school and community groups in non-violent resistance to Israeli occupation. Her most recent trip to Palestine was immediately cut short as she crossed the Israeli border: suspected of being a human rights activist, Israeli authorities detained, jailed, then deported Dewing. Bea then relocated to Frostburg, MD to open the Palestine Café; she joins the Wheels of Justice tour both as road manager and speaker.

Dave Lippman, one of America’s foremost non-corporate comedians, takes the air out of the windbags of the week, de-distorts history, and rewrites the classics with parody and thrust. On the bus tour, Lippman presents singing CIA agent George Shrub, who travels throughout his globalized domain sharing his Point of View (the Right One) so that people won’t need their own. He employs anti-folk songs and interventionary anthems in his role as Cultural Director of the Department of Homeland Security.

Dave traveled in Palestine and Israel in summer 2004 and presents his impressions through a song and picture piece, “Star of Goliath,” as well as speaking about his experiences and putting them global and historical context.

Visit him on the Wheels of Justice Tour or at www.davelippman.com.

Charles Sheehan-Miles served as a tank crewman with the 24th Infantry Division during the 1991 Gulf War, and was decorated for valor for helping rescue fellow tank crewmen from a burning tank during the Battle at Rumayla. He was the founding Executive Director of the National Gulf War Resource Center, from 1995-97, and served 18 months as a boardmember and treasurer of the Education for Peace in Iraq Center. He is a former executive director of the Nuclear Policy Research Institute, a Washington-based disarmament think-tank. Charles was one of the original co-founders of Veterans for Common Sense and became executive director in August 2004. He is the author of Prayer at Rumayla: A Novel of the Gulf War (XLibris, 2001) sheehanmiles.com.

A veteran of civil rights struggles, peace movements, military draft resistance and community-building, Deacon Tom Cornell offers too much to put into words. He is a veteran of the Catholic Worker Movement, former national secretary of the Catholic Peace Fellowship, a founder of Pax Christi, U.S.A., and the only Catholic living or dead who served as lieutenant to both A.J. Muste and Dorothy Day. He worked closely also with Barbara Deming, Thich Nhat Hahn, and, through Andrew Young, Martin Luther King, Jr.

Cornell has an extensive background in war resistance as organizer and vanguard participant; in 1963, he organized the first demonstration against the Viet Nam war 1963 and the first corporate act of draft resistance to the Viet Nam draft, the burning of draft cards, 1965. He served prison time for his acts of nonviolent resistance and was pardoned by President Jimmy Carter.

Cornell and his family live at Peter Maurin Farm in Marlboro, New York; he lectures throughout the U.S. and abroad. Cornell has spent considerable time in Iraq both before and after the most recent U.S. invasion.

Cliff Kindy is an organic market gardener, war tax resister, and pacifist. He has long been active with Christian Peacemaker Teams in Chiapas, Colombia, Palestine, Vieques, and First Nation struggles in North America and most recently spent three years in Iraq, five months each year. He stayed in Iraq throughout much of “shock and awe” and presently is part of a nonviolent campaign to end the production of depleted uranium weaponry here in the US.

Jerry Stein is a retired Catholic pastor, having pastored mostly rural churches. He was a college chaplain for two years each at Colorado State University and St. Mary of the Plains College. Jerry served six years at St. Francis of Assisi parish near Amarillo, which includes Pantex, where all US nuclear weapons are assembled. He has been on the Peace Farm Board, which owns property across from Pantex since near its beginning in 1986. Jerry has been involved in ecumenical affairs for many years in Kansas and Texas. He has been arrested at peacemaking actions at Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, in 1971, Offutt Air Base near Omaha, Missouri Missile Sites near Kansas City, the B-1 bomber base at Wichita, and the Nevada Test Site. He believes that Christians must strive to rid the world of war and all violence, to be faithful, though there be a great cost to that.

Jerry’s nonviolent intervention and witness have taken him to Chiapas, Palestine, Canada, and U.S.-occupied Iraq. Among other things, Stein’s work in Iraq included witness and advocacy for Abu-Gharaib prisoners’ families.

Cal has been in and out of the West Bank a number of times over the last couple of years as a member of Christian Peacemaker Teams in Hebron and At Tuwani, engaging in high-risk nonviolent witness and intervention. Much of his time is spent as a nonviolent presence to deter settler violence against native Palestinians.

Pat, of Webster, WI is a veteran of the armed services and member of Veterans for Peace; He has spent many years as a volunteer in Southeast Asian in the 60’s and Washington D.C. in the 90’s. Basler spent time in Iraq immediately prior to the most recent invasion. While in Iraq, Pat visited hospitals and other Iraqi civilian institutions threatened by the invasion and immersed himself among ordinary Iraqis. The past few years, Basler was part of Nukewatch’s efforts to challenge the antiquated ELF (Extra Low Frequency) nuclear weapons systems through nonviolent action—efforts which ultimately led the recent closure of the ELF program.

Nancy Stohlman, former coordinator of Colorado Campaign for Mideast Peace, is a Denver writer and co-author/editor of Live From Palestine: International and Palestinian Direct Action against the Israeli Occupation (South End Press), which is a finalist for a Colorado Book Award.

Stohlman was in the West Bank with the International Solidarity Movement during the Spring 2002 incursion, and her journals from Palestine were circulated internationally. She joins the wheels of justice as witness and key organizer in the Palestine solidarity movement.

Danny Muller was a cocoordinator of Voices in the Wilderness in Chicago and an active member of the Middle East Children’s Alliance (MECA). He is a tax resister, conscientious objector, musician, speaker, and organizer. He has traveled to Iraq numerous times, in opposition to US led sanctions and bombing, recently as a delegate with the Iraq Peace Team. In December 2003, Danny traveeled with MECA throughout the West Bank and Gaza and continues work against the economic and military occupation of Iraq and Palestine. Danny studied at St John’s University and Manhattan College, with a degree in Peace Studies and Political Science. Before his work with Voices in the Wilderness, Danny taught alternatives to violence for the NYC Board of Education. He has taught on the junior high, high school and university level.

While completing a degree in Social Work, Chrissy Kirchhoefer discovered her life work when she moved into the Catholic Worker community in Columbia, Missouri. Through her relationships with people living on the streets mostly veterans, those suffering from mental illness and undocumented workers, she began an informal education on the dynamics of systematic violence and its ravaging affects on individuals lives which compelled her to grassroots organizing. Over the past six years, Chrissy has worked with various national campaigns to close the School of the Americas, lift the sanctions/ stop the war in Iraq, prevent weapons in space and to halt the death penalty and has been placed in jail quite a few times for her efforts.

In May 2002, she traveled to Iraq on a joint delegation with Voices in the Wilderness US/UK and the Veterans for Peace Iraqi Water Project. While in Iraq, the UN passed the “smart sanctions” resolution in an attempt to counter the growing international outrage to the genocidal impact of the sanctions upon Iraq’s population. After her travels in Iraq, she returned to her hometown of St. Louis, also home to the ‘smart bomb’ at Boeing’s international weapons production headquarters. While working as the Coordinator of the Peace Economy Project, an organization committed to raising awareness and direct action around the military industrial complex, Kirchhoefer organized hundreds of people for numerous direct actions at Boeing, preventing the production or delivery of over 200 “smart bombs”.

From December to January, Chrissy Kirchhoefer traveled to the Occupied Palestinian Territories to work with the International Solidarity Movement and various organizations working to end the illegal occupation and erection of the Wall. She joined hundreds of Palestinians, Israelis and internationals in an intensified time of nonviolent direct actions against the construction of the wall; at one gathering she witnessed Israeli soldiers attempt to disperse the nonviolent demonstration by throwing stones into the crowd and shooting a former Israeli soldier with live ammunition. Kirchhoefer experienced some of the harshness of life under occupation as she lived under curfew for two weeks in the Balata refugee camp during the Israeli Army’s “Operation Stagnant Water” as well as the harshness of witnessing death. While she has been working specifically around disarmament issues for over 3 years, nothing could have fully prepared her for the 32 days of encountering US made and paid for weapons although Miami during the FTAA was a good training ground.

Chrissy enjoys hiking, biking, and traveling to different communities to learn about their struggles but thrives on conspiring with others to bring about change in the world.

Fresh off the boat from a 2-month stay in Iraq, Mike Ferner joined the Wheels of Justice Tour in early April ‘04. He also spent February 2003 in Baghdad and Basra with the Iraq Peace Team among ordinary Iraqi civilians as a peace witness and to an impending invasion. Mike Ferner served two terms as an independent member of the Toledo City Council, 1989-93 and ran for mayor as an independent candidate in 1993.

A veteran of the United States Navy, Mike Ferner served in the Navy Hospital Corps 1969-73; afterwards. He became a union organizer for the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) and communications director for the Farm Labor Organizing Committee (FLOC) AFL-CIO; he co-founded Toledo Coalition for Safe Energy, 1975. Mike Ferner is a member of Veterans for Peace, the Labor Party, and the ACLU.

Brian Buckley lives and works on the Little Flower Catholic Worker farm in central Virginia. The community strives to promote justice by “comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable” as Dorothy Day put it. They strive to live close to the land, share resources and seek to respond appropriately to communal and global justice issues of our day with compassion and strength.

Since returning from Najaf, Iraq and Palestine in mid-May, Brian has been talking to groups about appropriate responses and lifestyles to the violence that is being waged in the name of security, freedom, and the American people. Please join him in sowing the seeds of peace through compassionate listening, honest discussion, nonviolent action and compassionate intervention.

Jeff Leys, 40, traveled to Iraq with the Iraq Peace Team project organized by Voices in the Wilderness. He spent the month of February 2003 in Iraq with ordinary Iraqi civilians, saying, “It seemed to me that we need to have people over there who can experience what the Iraqi people are experiencing and then bring their voices back to the United States.” He returned to Iraq in November of 2003 with a delegation from Christian Peacemaker Teams, an effort of the historic peace churches, to witness the aftermath of this war and return to the United States. Having stood with the occupied and the war-torn, Jeff offers nothing less than an honest, realistic perspective on the current occupation and war.

Leys has long been involved in social justice work, dating back to his years in high school when he was active in opposing the renewal of registration for the draft in 1980 and the US war in Central America. His peacemaking efforts are a three-decade vocation in nonviolent witness and direct actions. Active around the ELF campaign in the mid-80’s, he and others disarmed ELF (Extra Low Frequency) transmitters, which send low frequency signals to coordinate a nuclear first-strike and missile attacks, in 1985. From ‘88-‘92, when American Indians in northern Wisconsin began to exercise their treaty rights regarding hunting and fishing, Leys and members of the Witness for Nonviolence campaign, maintained a nonviolent presence at the docks. They also interpositioned themselves between American Indians and armed agitators who threatened Native fishermen with violence for exercising their treaty rights.

Until recently, he worked as a union representative for SEIU District 1199 Wisconsin representing health care workers. He left that position to work full time with Voices in the Wilderness and to build opposition to the ongoing war against Iraq and the export/expansion of U.S. global militarism. Jeff Leys joined the Wheels of Justice tour shortly after serving a prison sentence for an action at ELF. He is currently coordinating the “Life Under Occupation” project for Voices in The Wilderness.

This is Jeff Leys’s second Wheels tour.

Lauren Anzaldo has traveled twice to Occupied Palestine. She spent two months summer 2003 living and working in Jenin (West Bank). There she taught English as a second language to elementary school students at a summer camp and to employees of Physicians Without Borders. She also volunteered with the International Solidarity Movement, a Palestinian-led movement of Palestinian and international activists committed to resisting the Israeli occupation of Palestine and to raising worldwide awareness about the conflict . After returning to her home town of Pensacola, Florida, Lauren Anzaldo co-founded the Florida Palestine Solidarity Network.

Lauren Anzaldo returned to Palestine in May 2004 as part of a weeklong Florida youth delegation. There she has visited and talked with residents of Qalqilyah, Hebron, Ramallah, Bethlehem and Jerusalem and has witnessed the devastating, compound impact of Israeli settlements and the Apartheid Wall in those areas. Lauren has also met with members of the brave Palestinian, Israeli and international nonviolent resistance movement to the Wall in the village of Biddu.

This is Lauren Anzaldo’s second Wheels tour.