This started out as a story for Free Speech Radio News but didn’t make it into today’s newscast. I’ve heard of the Flash player not working for a few folks. Listen to the MP3 if that’s the case for you. Cross-posted to Houston Indymedia, now featured on Indymedia.us.

A Fort Hood soldier faced a military trial today for refusing to deploy to Afghanistan, one week after another member of his unit was sentenced to 30 days in jail for refusing to go to war. Sergeant Travis Bishop was convicted on all charges and sentenced to one year in prison, loss of pay, and reduction in rank.

Unlike Victor Agosto, who resisted deployment to Afghanistan on the grounds that the war is unconstitutional, Bishop is a conscientious objector. He opposes all wars because of his Christian faith. I spoke with Bishop on Friday evening before he was sentenced.

“Jesus is very vocal about non-violent conflict resolution. Jesus is very, very anti-war. You can tell from all his sermons. As far as my state of mind I feel good. I feel better about facing prison because of that belief than going to Afghanistan and coming back a quote unquote ‘American hero.’”

Bishop says he realized he could file for conscientious objector status only days before his scheduled deployment to Afghanistan in March. He left the sprawling Killeen base for one week and is now charged with going AWOL and disobeying orders.

Desertion rates among the Army ranks rose 80 percent between 2003 and 2007. With tens of thousands more troops now headed to Afghanistan, anti-war activist Cynthia Thomas says G.I. support networks are crucial. She co-founded the Under the Hood Outreach Center and Cafe in Killeen.

“Our soldiers know here at Fort Hood that if they choose to be a soldier of conscience and resist orders to deploy that we are here, that they have the support, that we have this network here in Killeen. It’s really amazing sometimes when you have all these boys in here, sometimes they just come into sleep, to get away from the base…”

Bishop said he wouldn’t be able to resist deployment orders without the support from the local coffeehouse.

“Under the Hood has been incredibly good to me. They said no matter what my decision, deploy or not deploy, they were going to support me. I don’t think I’d have been able to do this at all, just by my lonesome. I don’t.”

Bishop said he hopes his decision will inspire other troops to question their service in the military. Last week supporters of Victor Agosto from across Texas gathered at Under the Hood cafe and rallied across from Fort Hood. [Chants from rally]

They’ll rally outside the base again for Travis Bishop this evening. Ansel Herz, Austin.

Update: The Southwest Workers Union is calling for a phone blast directed at Amnesty International and the Haitian Consulate in Haiti to stop Rama Carty’s deportation (info). Also, here (MP3) are excerpts of my interview with Sarnata Reynolds, Refugee Program Director at Amnesty.

From my story in today’s Free Speech Radio News headlines (listen here):

An update to a story FSRN has been following about a hunger strike at a Texas Immigration detention center… Human rights groups say they are concerned about an immigrant detainee who was suddenly moved to Louisiana for deportation yesterday. His tranfer comes after he spoke with representatives of Amnesty International at the Texas detention center where he was leading the hunger strike. FSRN’s Ansel Herz reports.

39-year-old Rama Carty has lived in the United States since he was 15-months-old. He was born in the Democratic Republic of Congo. He has never been to Haiti, where his parents are from, but he is scheduled to be deported there in about one week. For the past month Carty has helped lead a hunger strike at the Port Isabel Detention Center near Brownsville, Texas. After speaking with Amnesty International staff earlier this week, Carty was woken up Wednesday by prison guards and informed he was going to be transferred. Sarnata Reynolds, the Refugee Program Director at Amnesty International USA, describes what followed.

“We were told by other immigrants in the detention facility that an altercation took place and that there was a use of force by the immigration guards. His early morning transfer after he had spoken to us seemed to have a chilling effect on the immigrants that we spoke to that day. There was a lot of fear that he had been moved and transferred quickly because he had spoken to us.”

Community activists who spoke to detainees in the facility say Rama Carty was threatened, beaten and removed for speaking out about the conditions inside. Anayanse Garza with the Southwest Workers Union told FSRN she is worried about escalating repression of other protesting detainees inside the Port Isabel Detention Center. Ansel Herz, FSRN, Austin.

Listen to the excerpts of my interview with Anayanse Garza below (MP3).

I’ll try to upload my interview with Sarnata Reynolds from Amnesty Intl soon. Garza says individuals and groups around the country need to put pressure on Homeland Security, particularly Special Advisor on ICE and Detention & Removal Dora Schriro, to stop Rama Carty from being deported to Haiti. Get on it, folks!

• Previously on Mediahacker: Activists hold vigil for immigrant detainees on hunger strike
• Listen to Renee Feltz’ interview with Rama Carty from April here.
• For more information, see the Southwest Workers’ Union press release from earlier today here.

My first second-ever feature story for Free Speech Radio News looks back at the 81st Texas legislative session, which ends today. What’s “chubbing?” You can Google it if you want, or you can listen here.

On the night of November 2, 2004, I was standing outside a polling station with Mark Strama, handing flyers to citizens rushing in to vote before the election ended. I was a 16-year-old intern for Strama’s campaign for State Representative in the 50th District – my district. I won’t forget the moment when Strama got a text message on his Blackberry saying John Kerry was projected to win the presidency. We each let out a few whoops and cheers of joy. Bush’s apparent victory, of course, was all the more disappointing when I got home and saw the news. Strama, at least, beat the Republican incumbent by just 550 votes.

I saw Strama yesterday for the first time since 2004. He spoke with me for nearly a half hour in a Capitol corridor just outside the House chamber, but I couldn’t use more than a few seconds of the interview in my story. So I’m posting the nearly-complete interview below (MP3 here).

I imagine it’s of interest to Texas politics junkies and Strama’s constituents in the 50th District in Austin. For me, now an intense skeptic of government’s contribution to social justice no matter who’s in power, the interview was a useful window into the ongoing work of someone who has put all his energy, talent and passion into electoral politics. I think under other circumstances I would have been more rigorous in my questioning. Here’s his Wikipedia page and a breakdown of campaign contributions.

Also, I highly recommend Marc Becker’s story on an indigenous continental summit from today’s FSRN newscast.

My short story on this for FSRN is here. Image from the Associated Press.

I spoke earlier today by phone to Dr. Eloisa Tamez, who owns a tract of property on the Texas-Mexico border and has been fighting the government’s attempt to construct a wall on it for over a year. She is a member of the Lipan Apache tribe and her family has owned the land for several centuries. Federal judge Andrew Hanen ruled in March that the Department of Homeland Security must negotiate with landowners before property can be seized, but yesterday he ordered Tamez to allow DHS to start construction on her land.

Dr. Tamez told me that she is disappointed with the ruling and will continue speaking out. She said she has seen nothing to indicate President Obama will change the border wall policy – especially since wall construction is providing jobs in the area. Tamez believes she can still appeal the ruling, but says Homeland Security contractors have already been trespassing on areas of her land.

Here’s a complete transcript of my interview with her (I’ve added emphasis in certain places).

Mediahacker: Dr. Tamez, could you just share with me your reaction to the ruling yesterday?

Tamez: Well, of course I was very saddened by it but my lawyers worked very hard to respond to every motion that was set forth by the government. And we worked hard at finding out a different result, so I guess in that respect we had exhausted all possible answers to whatever the goverment was claiming. So I have a lot of respect for Judge Hanen. I think that he has given us, here in South Texas the landowners here in El Calaboz, many opportunities to be heard. And for that I am grateful, to see that there are some judges and especially Judge Hanen, who uphold the Constitution. So I’m proud of that.

Other than that I think that the whole situation started out as a political thing, and it’s still a political thing. Because currently if President Obama and Secretary Napolitano were to put a stop to this, that would mean canceling contracts, jobs for those who are working with the contractors, and that would that wouldn’t be [inaudible] for President Obama, who is claiming to want to create jobs – that’s one of his priorities. So again, some of us have to suffer continually for corporations and also at the hands of our own government for political reasons.

Mediahacker: So do you have any appeals left available to you in the process, or not at this point?

Tamez: I believe that there is an opportunity for appeal. We have not been told that there is not one. I don’t know at this point. We’re talking about our options, I don’t know which direction we’re going to go. I know that we will concentrate on using our energies to think about what we will discuss when we sit down and negotiate, because Judge Hanen has presented us with a very nicely written paragraph an opportunity to sit down and discuss various factors that are of importance, before the government comes in and takes my land. So we want to work on that and make sure that we have a good chance to be heard as we sit down through that process.

Mediahacker: In March Judge Hanen ruled that DHS needed to negotiate with you and other landowners. I guess I’m wondering, is it his position or his ruling that those negotiations effectively took place already or is that still going to happen?

Tamez: We still have some things to work out, for example the fair market value of the land they want. And so the hearing is still set for that to take place in October. It’s been rolled up to October because we were not able to find appraisers for our land. We couldn’t hire anybody, the government had apparently contracted all the ones available in the valley. So it was difficult to come up with some answers when we couldn’t get an appraiser to do the job for us. When the hearing, the trial that takes place in October, is to look at the compensation, from what I understand from the document from the judge.

Mediahacker: What are your plans in the near-term? This ruling allows DHS to start building effective immediately, I guess. What are you going to do from here? I know that you have been trying to resist this for a long time.

Tamez: I’m going to continue to speak out and tell the story. And continue to be the voice of the people in the El Calaboz area. Because even some of those people who signed the waiver are talking about the process and from their stories they were pretty much forced into making a decision and threatened to turn over their property to the government. There were varying amounts of compensation given to them for what appear to be equal amounts of land. So the story will continue. And we will continue to talk about it so that more and more people will learn about the injustices that low-income people face as opposed to those on the path of the wall that didn’t even have a wall built because they just happen to be [inaudible], a resort or maybe a plantation owner or [inaudible]. Those who are fortunate enough to have those kinds of resources don’t get a wall as opposed to low-income Mexican Americans living in communities – yeah, we get the wall. So I will continue to talk about that. They ain’t gonna stop me. They can build this wall but they’re not going to take my voice away.

Mediahacker: And can you real briefly summarize what this is physically going to do your tract of property in terms of the environment and vegetation, and also your quality of life?

Tamez: That’s really what’s interesting is that we still don’t have the very specific answers from the government on where they plan to build it or what’s going to look like or anything like that. They have failed in their explanations, even though they were ordered by the court, they have failed. So that’s what needs to be clarified. As for [inaudible] plant life and animal life? Yes! I’ve been going there where they’re building the wall all around me and I see some of the wildlife escaping from the area. I see a lot of the plant life just totally crushed and scooped out. And many of the plants in those grounds are plants that we use for medicinal purposes. And so they’re completely scraped away…

Mediahacker: I know that you met Barack Obama while he was campaigning. Have you seen any changes in terms of DHS policy since his taking office and do you hold out any hope that him and the new Homeland Security Secretary will change plans at all?

Tamez: I see no change. I’ve seen no comment on it. I don’t know what the plans are, because, well, they haven’t said much. So I’m still wondering what we’re going to see. And I still remember that he voted for the wall when he was a Senator. He voted for it. And I also know that all the counties except two, along the river, went Democrat. Now, if the Democrats want to see Texas become blue, they had better pay attention to the political power that we can have when we start mobilizing.

Mediahacker: As a member of the Lipan Apache tribe, how do you feel, again, to have the federal government encroaching on your land?

Tamez: Well once again, it’s losing land to the government but this time it’s even more distressing because some of the plant life that we depend on for medicinal purposes is being eviscerated from the property. You know, DHS said they have no interest in the south part of my property, but you should see what they’ve done to it. If they have no interest then why are they trespassing?