The Not In Our Name (NION) project—a self-described “peace movement”—was initiated on March 23, 2002 by the longtime Maoist activist and Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP) member C. Clark Kissinger. NION produced, most notably, two documents publicly denouncing America's post-9/11 policies, both foreign and domestic. One of those documents, the NION “Pledge of Resistance,” condemned the U.S. government's 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 U.S.—and not any other nation—that posed the most “grave dangers to the people of the world.”
NION was a member organization of the After Downing Street and United for Peace and Justice anti-war coalitions. It also maintained a close alliance with IFCO, whose federal tax-exempt status enabled it to serve as NION's fiscal sponsor (thereby allowing donations to NION to be tax-exempt). Moreover, the mutual ties between NION, IFCO, and WILPF were considerable: WILPF chairperson Molly Klopot was a NION organizer, and WILPF executive director Marilyn Clement was IFCO's treasurer.
By NION's reckoning, America's declared war on terrorism was nothing more than a fraudulent pretext for world conquest by a power-hungry Bush administration. America's closest ally in the Middle East—Israel—was likewise abhorred by NION. In September 2002, for example, NION condemned the Israeli “tanks and bulldozers” that “have left a terrible trail of death and destruction” in Palestinian territories.
During the run-up to the U.S. invasion of Iraq in early 2003, NION helped organize a number of major “peace” rallies in various U.S. cities; some of these drew as many as 200,000 people. Hard-left, anti-American radicals made up the bulk of the guest speakers at these events. At an October 6, 2002 NION demonstration in New York, for instance, two of the speakers were Sami Al-Arian (a leader of the terrorist organization Palestinian Islamic Jihad) and Lynne Stewart (the radical attorney who was convicted of illegally transmitting messages on behalf of her incarcerated terrorist client, Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman).
Once the Iraq War was underway, no American military achievement was deemed even remotely worthy of praise by NION. Consider, for example, NION's response to the December 2003 capture of former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein by U.S. forces:
“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?”
In July 2005, NION joined a coalition that included, among others, such notable individuals and organizations as Eve Ensler, Gloria Steinem, the Center for Constitutional Rights, Code Pink, the Culture Project, and United For Peace and Justice—who together issued a “call to shut down the Guantánamo prison camp and demand an immediate independent investigation into the widespread allegations of abuse taking place there.” 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 [Jimmy] Carter and [Bill] Clinton have joined leading human rights groups in calling for the closing of Guantánamo and other illegal prison facilities around the globe.”
