Rob Kall:
(laughs) So you've done this
scores of times, and what is the best outcome that you ever achieved doing
this?
Medea Benjamin: Well, I see this as a tactic in a whole host
of other tactics; so I don't isolate it, and I don't - (laughs) well, it might
sound like I spend a lot of my time doing this kind of thing. It's really a minimal amount of time. I spend a lot of time on other things that
are more the day-to-day kind of [things]: organizing, and writing, and public
education. So this is just a minor part
of what we do.
But if you look at the issue of drones, I'm quite
amazed at how much we have helped to change policy in the course of one
year! When my book came out, there
wasn't a lot of organizing going on, and now there are protests regularly at
the bases where the drones are being piloted, at the headquarters of companies
making the drones, at the offices of Congresspeople, in front of the White
House, at the Pentagon, The CIA. There
are religious leaders now speaking out, and there are more people in the legal
community that are involved, and the more traditional Human Rights groups.
So things have really changed, and I put all of
those pieces of our tactics together to say that they have been very effective
forcing the administration to shed light on a policy that they had refused to
talk about, because it was "covert," and force them to talk about civilian
casualties, force them to restrain themselves in the use of drones. The number of drone strikes has been going
down in Pakistan thanks to all of these protests, and especially inside of
Pakistan, and the number of drone strikes in Yemen this year has been going
down.
I think it's an example of how to mobilize
strategically, to embarrass the administration.
And we're not done yet. We still
have a lot of work to do, because as Obama said in his speech, they're still
going to be using these killer drones.
But we're making a lot of progress.
Rob Kall: That's
cool. Now, are there times when you have
multiple people go into a room, so that if one person is grabbed, another
person can start? Is that a strategy
that you have used also?
Medea Benjamin: Oh yes.
When it was John Brennan's confirmation hearing to be the head of the
CIA we had about thirty people, and maybe twelve of them were willing to risk
arrest. And so we actually numbered
them: you go first, you're second, you're third, you're fourth, because we
wanted to really drag the whole thing out and have people popping up
periodically. So it was a great
strategy; and after the fifth person got up and said something, and each one of
them getting pulled out and arrested, Diane Feinstein just closed the hearing
and said, "We won't have any more of this," and it made huge news.
So I think our definite preference is to get more
people in a room and have different people who are ready to do different
things. In that case everybody had a
different issue that they were going to focus on. People had different ways that they were
going to do it: one woman standing up on a cheer, one guy was going to do a
kind of a rap, one person had a rag doll which she was going to be using as her
prop. So it's great when you have more
people. I know that there's a lot of
times that people just do a symbolic arrest where everybody's doing the same
thing, but I like to see it more varied.
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