We are pleased to announce that Ray McGovern, Stephen F. Downs, Cathy Breen, Martha Henessey, Ellen Barfield and Brian Terrell are presenting at this year's conference. Playwright Jack Gilroy will be on hand to comment on his play "The Predator". The Rev. Chris J. Antal will be leading this year's retreat also.
Rev. Chris J. Antal
The Rev. Chris J. Antal is an ordained Unitarian Universalist Minister and military chaplain recently returned from Afghanistan, after his “Veteran’s Day Confession for America” sermon earned him a General Officer Memorandum of Reprimand and an early release from Active Duty. Rev. Antal preaches at congregations throughout the Northeast on the theme war healing and peacemaking, and has led Circles of Trust in congregations in Albany and Newburgh. He currently serves as Community Minister for the Church of the Larger Fellowship, a virtual UU congregation for isolated religious liberals, and as Consulting Minister for the UU Congregation of Rock Tavern and the not-for-profit organization Soldier’s Heart. Rev. Antal received his undergraduate education at Rhode Island School of Design and professional education for ministry at Unification Theological Seminary, Meadville Lombard School for the Ministry, and Hartford Seminary. Chris is married to Mitsuko Ishikawa of Japan and they live together with their five children in the Hudson Valley.
Ellen Barfield has been a nonviolent peace and justice activist for over 25 years. After
serving overseas in West Germany and South Korea, she left the US Army in 1981
and used Army money to return to college, harboring a vague notion of wanting to do
something to challenge social problems. As she graduated, activists began peace
gatherings at the Pantex nuclear weapons plant outside her home town of Amarillo,
TX. Over several years she embraced the anti-nuclear weapons movement, and
eventually lived at and managed the Red River Peace Network's Peace Farm across
the highway from the Pantex plant.
Ellen moved to Dallas to live with her second husband Larry Egbert whom she had
met in Red River, and continued helping to organize Red River events at Pantex, as
well as doing reproductive choice, feminist, AIDS and LGBT, civil and human rights
and peace work in Dallas. Ellen and Larry traveled to Nicaragua with a Pastors for
Peace caravan in late 1995 and lived in Leon, then settled in Baltimore, MD.
Ellen has served on the national boards of Veterans For Peace, the War Resisters
League, School of the Americas Watch, and Women's International League for Peace
and Freedom, and is the co-founder and coordinator of the Baltimore Phil Berrigan
Memorial Chapter of Veterans For Peace. She has traveled to Iraq, Palestine, and
Nicaragua on multiple peace delegations.
Part of Ellen's activism is risking arrest in civil resistance for the environment, human
rights, and peace. Her first arrest was at the Nevada nuclear weapons test site in 1988,
and her first serious arrest was one week later blocking the gate at the Pantex plant, for
which she later was fined over $1000. She continues to do actions with the National
Campaign for Nonviolent Resistance and the Baltimore Pledge of Resistance. She has
considered doing a Plowshares action to dismantle nuclear or other weapons systems,
and recently participated in discernment and close support for the Transform Now
Plowshares action of Megan Rice, Michael Walli, and Greg Boertje-Obed at the Y-12
nuclear weapons plant in Oak Ridge, TN.
Cathy Breen
Iraq 2013 Occupation and its Aftermath - In May of this year Cathy Breen visited Iraq to see the consequences of the many years of US Occupation. Her presentation will be centered on her recent trip.
Stephen F. Downs
"WAR DESTROYS LAW - How the War on Terror, the War on Drugs, the War on Crime, The War to Secure our Borders, and the War with Drones creates political prisoners and political assassinations and destroys our legal system".
Stephen F. Downs graduated from Cornell Law School in 1969, after previously serving for 2 years in the American Peace Corp in India. He spent most of his legal career as the Chief Attorney for the NY State Commission on Judicial Conduct disciplining bad judges. He retired in 2003, and in 2006 volunteered to be part of the defense team for Yassin Aref, a local imam charged with terrorism related offenses. After Aref and his co-defendant were convicted and sentenced to 15 years, Downs became convinced that the US Government had deliberately convicted an innocent man in a process known as preemptive prosecution (prosecuting someone before they commit a crime for ideological reasons). It changed his life.
Downs became a founding member of the Muslim Solidarity Committee to raise money and help take care of the two families and 10 children of the defendants. When other similar cases of preemptive prosecution were discovered, including the cases of Rafil Dhafir, Fahad Hashmi, Lynne Stewart, the Newburg 4 and the Ft. Dix 5, Downs became a co-founder of Project SALAM, dedicated to documenting all of the cases of preemptive prosecution in a data base, and advocating for the release of the defendants. (Project SALAM is now following over 800 cases in its data base.)
In 2010, Project SALAM became one of 18 founding members of the National Coalition to Protect Civil Freedoms (NCPCF), which is dedicated to eliminating preemptive prosecution, profiling and prisoner abuse. NCPCF runs educational programs to raise awareness of the problems, maintains a data base to follow the cases, advocates for legal solutions to the existing injustices, publishes a news digest and other material to counter false media information, and creates programs to help prisoners and their families. Downs is now the interim Executive Director of NCPCF. ( swdowns68@aol.com ) For more information on Preemptive Prosecution and Prisoner Abuse and the many cases associated with them, go to www.projectsalam.org and click on Downs article “ Victims of America’s Dirty Wars.”. For more information on NCPCF, go to www.civilfreedoms.org .
Jack Gilroy
Jack Gilroy has written two award winning novels of young men who refused to follow government orders to train to kill. Absolute Flanigan and The Wisdom Box published by Binghamton University. Over the past several years, Gilroy has written a series of plays that examine the power of conscience over the power of government. Gilroy’s plays, Render to Caesar?, followed by Sentenced to Death for Not Killing, have been performed at the Columbus, Ga Convention Center. Most recently, The Predator, a play based on a young woman whose mother, a drone pilot, believes her college age daughter should make the military her career. The Predator has been read at universities (e.g. Georgetown, Wittenberg, Syracuse) and numerous other venues.
Jack Gilroy is a retired high school teacher, full time activist, veteran of two military services and former prisoner of conscience.
Martha Hennessy
Dorothy Day, her life and her work.
Martha lives and works between her family homestead in Vermont and Maryhouse Catholic Worker in lower Manhattan. She is the seventh of nine grandchildren to Dorothy Day, co-founder of the Catholic Worker movement. Martha is herself a grandmother, and she works very part time as an occupational therapist. She has travelled to the Middle East, Russia, Europe and Afghanistan in search of peace making and cultural understanding. She participates in resistance work against war, torture, and nuclear power/weapons. Martha states "I am committed to the Catholic Worker tradition of welcoming the needy, celebrating the dignity of work and speaking out against war and injustice, all grounded on a foundation of prayer".
Ray McGovern
The Moral Imperative of Activism.
Ray McGovern leads the "Speaking Truth to Power" section of Tell the Word, an expression of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in inner-city Washington. He also teaches at its Servant Leadership School. Ray came from his native New York to Washington in the early Sixties as an Army infantry/intelligence officer and then served as a CIA analyst from the administration of John F. Kennedy to that of George H. W. Bush. Ray's duties included chairing National Intelligence Estimates and preparing the President's Daily Brief, which he briefed one-on-one to President Ronald Reagan's most senior national security advisers from 1981 to 1985. In January 2003, Ray helped create Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) to expose the way intelligence was being falsified to "justify" war on Iraq. On the afternoon of the day (Feb. 5, 2003) Secretary of StateColin Powell misled the UN Security Council on Iraq,VIPS sent an urgent memorandum to President George W. Bush, in which we gave Powell a C minus for content. We ended the memo with this: "No one has a corner on the truth; nor do we harbor illusions that our analysis is irrefutable or undeniable [as Powell had claimed]. But after watching Secretary Powell today, we are convinced that you would be well served if you widened the discussion beyond ... the circle of those advisers clearly bent on a war for which we see no compelling reason and from which we believe the unintended consequences are likely to be catastrophic." Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Jay Rockefeller, after a five-year study by his committee, described the intelligence used to "justify" war on Iraq as "unsubstantiated, contradicted, or even non-existent." As an act of conscience, on March 2, 2006 Ray returned the Intelligence Commendation Medallion given him at retirement for "especially meritorious service," explaining, "I do not want to be associated, however remotely, with an agency engaged in torture." He returned it to Rep. Peter Hoekstra (R, Michigan), then-House Intelligence Committee Chairman. Hoekstra then added to the Intelligence Authorization Act for FY'07 (HR5020) a provision that could have enabled the government to strip intelligence veterans of their government pensions. HR5020 passed the full House, but Congress opted instead for a continuing resolution. Thus, Ray was spared from having to go back to driving part-time for Red Top Cab. On May 4, 2006, in Atlanta, Ray made national news by confronting Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld on live TV with pointed questions like: "Why did you lie to get us into a war that was not necessary and that has caused these kinds of casualties?" (The impromptu, four-minute mini-debate that followed is still receiving hits on You Tube.) Ray's opinion pieces have appeared in many leading newspapers here and abroad. His website writings are posted first on consortiumnews.com, and are usually carried on other websites as well. He has debated at the Oxford Forum and appeared on Charlie Rose, The Newshour, CNN, and numerous other TV & radio programs and documentaries. Ray has lectured to a wide variety of audiences here and abroad. Ray studied theology and philosophy (as well as his major, Russian) at Fordham University, from which he holds two degrees. He also holds a Certificate in Theological Studies from Georgetown University. A Catholic, Mr. McGovern has been worshipping for over a decade with the ecumenical Church of the Saviour and teaching at its Servant Leadership School. He was co-director of the school from 1998 to 2004. He has been invited to lecture at various interfaith and ecumenical events, and has given the sermon at a number of Christian churches and Jewish synagogues. He is particularly fond of the "substitute teaching" he has been invited to do at universities and colleges. Fluent in Russian, German, and Spanish, Ray holds an M.A. in Russian from Fordham University and a Certificate in Theological Studies from Georgetown. He is also a graduate of Harvard Business School's Advanced Management Program. He and his wife have been married for 50 years; they have five children and eight grandchildren
Brian Terrell
From Protest to Prison and Back again.
Brian Terrell - Maloy, Iowa— Brian lives and works at Strangers and Guests Catholic Worker Farm in Maloy, Iowa, where with his partner, Betsy Keenan and others, he tends a large garden and small herd of goats and chickens. From this little farm, Brian travels around Iowa and beyond, speaking and acting with communities that are working for justice and peace. His travels include Iraq and Afghanistan and he was deported from Bahrain in 2012 after witnessing the violent repression of human rights activists there. In recent years, he has been active in resistance to remote controlled murders by drones with friends in Nevada, New York and Missouri and on May 24 of this year he was released from a six month federal prison sentence for participating in a peaceable assembly in protest of drones at Whiteman Air Force Base in Missouri.