Photo: Jessie Tierney
September 2007 | Choice News
Abu-Ghraib Interrogator Turns Anti-War Activist
When he was only 17 years old, Iowa native Joshua Casteel enlisted in the U.S. Army Reserves. Hailing from a military family with an evangelical religious background, it seemed the right path for him. But after basic training, studying Arab linguistics, being deployed to Abu Ghraib in June of 2004 and interrogating prisoners, he found himself confronting a self-professed jihadist from Saudi Arabia.
“The entire time we spoke,” Casteel, now 27, explains, “he talked to me with a gentle calmness and evangelical tone. He tried to convert me to Islam from start to finish, and being an evangelical, I felt in familiar territory, as if I were speaking simply to my Muslim counterpart.” When their conversation turned to war and violence, Casteel asked the prisoner why he came to Iraq to kill: the man’s response was to ask Casteel the same question. “At that point I knew I could go no further, unless I wanted to get into a debate about which one of us had the ‘more just’ cause.”
Very soon thereafter Casteel filed for conscientious objector status and was granted an honorable discharge on May 31. Since returning to his Midwestern home, he has been studying Nonfiction and Playwriting at the University of Iowa, combating post-traumatic stress with art.
Last February, he was in Chicago performing in Returns, a play he wrote which explores living with his memories of war in Abu Ghraib. It was staged at Columbia College, with an intimate audience and limited props — everything they used fit into a suitcase. The idea was that the play could travel easily and be performed in church basements, VFW halls, and schools. It will be staged again in November at Princeton’s McArthur Theater under the direction of David Gothard, of Ireland’s Abbey Theatre.
Casteel was also interviewed in Iraq For Sale, David Greenwald’s documentary on war profiteering, and is featured in a new documentary called Soldiers of Conscience, as an “ambassador of the Christian message.” On February 16, in an act of conscious civil disobedience, he was arrested at a sit-in organized by the Occupation Project. Later, while sitting in a jail cell with his friends, he joked, “If only my detainees could see me now.”
Also in February, Casteel traveled to Rome and Assisi to speak with the pope, members of the curia, cardinals, and archbishops about the Just War doctrine and civil disobedience, where he proposed making more contact with individual Catholics about refusing to fight in an unjust war.
Now living in Grand Rapids, MI, while completing his thesis, Casteel says he is putting much of his focus into finishing his memoir and in publishing a collection of war correspondence, called Letters from Abu Ghraib. In it, Casteel writes, “I know who I am and where I am going by the act of remembering.” By making the realities he faced in the war real, he invites us to remember with him.
Check out Soldiers of Conscience (socfilm.com) and Iraq for Sale (iraqforsale.org) and keep your eyes peeled for Letters from Abu Ghraib, due out in January 2008.
— Jessie Tierney
Green Goes Postal
After Wal-Mart, the post office is the second-largest employer in America.
So when the USPS greens its parcel service — implementing “cradle to cradle” policy for all Express and Priority packaging — it’s more than just big news.
While a “cradle to grave” policy results in products eventually ending up in a landfill, “cradle to cradle” products are 100 percent renewable. The USPS collaborated on its new environmentally-sound packaging with MBDC, a firm founded in 1995 by architect William McDonough and famed “green chemist” Michael Braungart. MBDC’s chemists met with USPS suppliers, analyzed 14,000 of their ingredients, and made sure every last one met 39 criteria for human and environmental health, including toxicity, renewable energy, water stewardship and recyclability.
The new cradle to cradle standards will save 15,000 metric tons of carbon emissions annually. To get some perspective on that number, consider that the gigantic South By Southwest music festival in Austin, Texas generates only 250 metric tons of carbon emissions each year — and that’s from power sources, travel and transportation from around the world and wastes generated by printing, promotion and festival-related goods combined.
With the postal service, an industry leader, adopting rigorous new standards for sustainability — and thereby pushing their suppliers to go green — it’s likely that the ripple effect of this eco-consciousness won’t just expand to other shippers like FedEx and UPS, but also to related industries, like producers of packaging, paper, cardboard, tapes, adhesives and plastics. According to MBDC’s Executive Overview, the USPS’s new “products and services are designed based on patterns found in nature, eliminating the concept of waste entirely and creating an abundance that is healthy and sustaining.”
Now, if the USPS could only nudge the nation’s largest employer to adopt equally responsible policies.
— Lucinda Michele Knapp
Photo: Timmy Samuel; Courtesy Center On Halsted
The New LGBT Center on Halsted:
You’ve Come A Long Way, Baby
What is now the Center on Halsted (COH) began over 30 years ago as a volunteer-run meeting place for gays and lesbians. From a coffeehouse, to a room above a restaurant, to a one-room basement space, the organization has relocated six times since its inception, most recently to Halsted and Wavelend. But, unlike previous locations, which were, in the words of Courtney Reid of COH, “in darker spaces off the beaten path,” the new $24 million home echoes the theme of its grand opening gala, “Out and Open.” Planning for the Center began immediately after the property was secured in 2001; after many surveys, blueprints, donations, and labor hours, the doors are open.
As Reid puts it, “this building represents how the LGBT [lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender] community has really transformed over the last several decades. It’s okay to be out in the open. It’s okay to be out in an enormous, beautiful space.”
The Midwest’s largest community center for LGBT persons proudly stands three stories tall in a façade made primarily from green eco-glass. It’s 55,000 square feet, not including anchor tenant Whole Foods, provides cultural, emotional, social, educational, and recreational programs in a welcoming, healthy, community oriented environment. The new space includes a gymnasium, black box theatre that seats 160, computer lab, commercial kitchen for cooking and nutrition classes, youth programming, mental health services, senior area, meeting rooms equipped with plasma screens, and full offices for partner organizations.
These amenities, combined with the centralization of LGBT organizations, allows COH to “take the synergy between it all and really create some wonderful opportunities,” states Reid.
The Center on Halsted is one of the first of its kind not only because it offers such comprehensive opportunities under one roof, but also because the roof under which these opportunities unfold is green. COH’s rooftop, named after Mayor Richard M. Daley, has more to offer than a stunning view of downtown; it also reduces heat island effect and collects rainwater which is then used for the facility’s wastewater. Other environmental features include the use of daylight and motion sensors to regulate light systems and utilization of CO2 sensors to monitor the heating and cooling system. These innovative environmental efforts, coupled with others, earned the Center on Halsted LEED silver certification.
The new union is apt. While the green movement has always advocated social justice, COH makes a literal partnership of the two, setting an inspiring example of progressive social and environmental partnerships.
For more information, visit centeronhalsted.org.
— Brooke Bailey
Tang Center Carves Niche for Herbal
Medicine in the Scientific World
The University of Chicago, internationally renowned for its hospitals and medical research, has opened the Tang Center, whose work is slowly carving a niche for herbal medicine in the normally dismissive scientific world.
With one third of Americans using alternative therapies for ailments from hypertension to cancer, the research done at the Center could stand to change the way we look at — and regulate — herbal medicine.
The Tang Center, located in Hyde Park at U of C’s Medical Center, evaluates both benefits and risks of medicinal herbs through evidence-based research, and provides “unbiased information” to healthcare professionals and health-conscious consumers via their website.
Both physicians and consumers can benefit from the research done at the Tang Center. Dr. Chun-Su Yuan, director of the Center, stresses that “Consumers may think a herbal supplement is natural, but it still may interact with drugs or surgery.” A patient — or doctor — may not know, for example, that Ginseng stimulates the immune system and improves energy, but it can cause rapid heartbeat, high blood pressure, excessive bleeding and low blood sugar levels during surgery.
Currently, there is no requirement to register dietary supplements with the FDA. In addition to changing the minds of the fifty percent of doctors who don’t believe in herbal medicine, the Tang Center’s research is working to help the reputability of herbal medicines in the scientific world.
However, to Americans who fear for their health freedom and prospective CODEX legislation — which, among other dictates, would limit the availability of herbal medicines to a prescription-only basis — this research may be a troubling step toward regulation.
Dr. Yuan says, “research done at the Tang Center will aid in the standardization and regulation of herbal medicines.” He clarifies that by standardization and regulation, he is referring to “the academic and scientific approach — not necessarily as outlined in the CODEX legislation,” which he explains is “a legal issue.”
Funding for the Center comes from the Tang Foundation — an international donor that channels resources toward healthcare and education — as well as the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM), a federal agency within the Department of Health & Human Services, which awards $120 million in CAM grants per year.
The Tang center’s website details background, uses, phytochemistry/pharmacology, safety, and preparations/dosage for a number of herbs and botanicals they have studied and tested so far, and continues to update as research presses onward.
— Jessie Tierney
Don’t Get Mad, Get Active
Take the 11th Hour Challenge!
The 11th Hour, produced and narrated by Leonardo DiCaprio, has partnered with EarthLab to create “The 11th Hour Challenge.” The goal is for 1 million people to take simple steps to reduce their environmental impact by 10 percent by the end of this year. People calculate and track their results at Earthlab.com. If the goal is reached, it would result in an annual reduction of 2,000,000 tons of carbon dioxide emissions, equivalent to removing 280,000 U.S. cars from the road. Nearly 700,000 people have already joined EarthLab, launched on July 7, 2007, in conjunction with Live Earth.
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