Founded by Revolutionary Communist Party member C. Clark Kissinger
Has condemned U.S. foreign and domestic policies after 9/11
The Not In Our Name (NION) project -- a self-described "peace movement" -- was initiated on March 23, 2002 by the longtime Maoist activist C. Clark Kissinger, who is a member of the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP), a Marxist-Leninist-Maoist group calling for the overthrow of the U.S. government and its replacement with a Communist dictatorship. In 1987 Kissinger founded the radical "Refuse and Resist!", which became a member organization of NION.
The NION project produced, most notably, two documents publicly denouncing America's post-9/11 policies, both foreign and domestic. One of these documents, the NION "Pledge of Resistance," condemned "the injustices done by our government" in its pursuit of "endless war"; its greed-driven "transfusions of blood for oil"; its determination to "erode [our] freedoms"; and its eagerness to "invade countries, bomb civilians, kill more children, [and annihilate] families on foreign soil."
A separate document, the NION "Statement of Conscience," condemned not only the Bush administration's "stark new measures of repression," but also its "unjust, immoral, illegitimate, [and] openly imperial policy towards the world." According to NION, it was the American government -- and not that of any other nation -- that posed the most "grave dangers to the people of the world."
NION's Advisory Board consisted of Russell Banks, Kimberley Crenshaw, Eve Ensler, Jeremy Glick, Abdeen Jabara, Robin D.G. Kelley, Rabbi Michael Lerner, Tony Kushner, Dave Marsh, Rev. E. Randall Osburn, Michael Ratner, Naomi Wallace, and Howard Zinn.
At an October 6, 2002 NION rally, two of the specially invited guest speakers were former University of South Florida professor Sami Al-Arian, who is intimately involved with the terrorist organization Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and the radical attorney Lynne Stewart, who was convicted of illegally passing messages on behalf of her incarcerated client Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman -- the terrorist mastermind of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.
NION considered America's declared war on terrorism to be a fraudulent pretext for world conquest concocted by a power-hungry Bush administration. In NION's view, no American military success -- however large or small -- was worthy of praise. Rather, the organization deemed the United States culpable for the very problems that led to war in the first place.
Consider, for example, NION's response to the American military's December 2003 capture of former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein:
"This 'new development' in the 'war on terrorism' does not change the fact that this war is immoral, unjust, and illegitimate. It does not change the violations of international law, the lies used to justify the war ... or the tens of thousands of Iraqi lives stolen, or the hundreds of U.S. lives lost. … And as they talk about finally seeking justice for the Iraqi people by putting Saddam on trial, they will conveniently leave out any mention of the crimes done to the Iraqi people by the United States. … It was the U.S-led sanctions that killed over half a million Iraqi children since 1990. Who will put the U.S. administration on trial for war crimes?”
Added NION: "Guantánamo has become a world-wide symbol for the current Administration's arrogant disregard of basic human rights. In the past weeks, world leaders including Presidents Carter and Clinton have joined leading human rights groups in calling for the closing of Guantánamo and other illegal prison facilities around the globe."
In the spring of 2007, NION posted on its website a tribute to Gold Star Families for Peacefounder Cindy Sheehan, in recognition of her “resignation as the public face of the anti-war movement,” a movement that NION said “has been fighting to end the illegal and immoral occupation of Iraq, fighting to stop the attacks on immigrants and on the people of the world at large, and fighting to defend civil liberties.”
