'I beg you, I emplore you, I beseach you, in the name of God, stop the repression." Archpishop Oscar Romero right before his assassination.

I was talking with a young acquaintance the other morning. She was telling me about a Peace University she had studied at in Ireland. We were talking about the age old question of whether it is more effective to work on policy issues at home or to be on the ground in paces where abuses are taking place in solidarity with the local people. There is no right answer. My experience was that we have to trust our instincts. Personally, no matter how painful being in Central America during the 'troubles' was, I always got more than I gave. The peasants were inspiring to be with. The power of heart I felt from them trumped all else. I didn't have to wonder, however, where I could help the most. They told me, "Go home and tell our story."

I did just that. But, we do have a frightening blind spot here in the USA regarding taking responsibility for our actions elsewhere. I was good at telling the story of what we were doing in Central America, especially Guatemala. But, our well schooled belief that we are the best and brightest country in the world made it hard for many to take action.

One day I was at a friend's house in New Hampshire. She worked for the Clinton administration. At that moment Jennifer Harbury was fasting in Guatemala to get some action on the disappearance of her husband, a Mayan man. The Clinton people wanted to know whether she was some kind of nut case. She was no such thing. She just happened to have so much more courage than most mortals that we could hardly relate. As she continued her campaign, going back and fourth between Washington and Guatemala and also working with immigrant legal affairs in Texas, several assassination attempts on her life occurred. We have read about the recent court case involving the former president of Guatemala and his US backed genocide. Much horrible suffering could have been stopped if we had listened to what was going on (WITH OUR MONEY AND FULL BACKING) at the time.

The thing is...what can we do? We have known about the daily drone strikes in the Middle East since they started to happen. Congress is just now "looking into the situation".  We know that our CIA and many other organizations are dealing drugs, assassinating leaders, and arming everybody. Jeremy Scahill and Noam Chomsky and others are telling the real story in real time, yet we go about our daily business and wait for the same people who are doing this shit (IN OUR NAME) to rectify it.

I think that we don't know who we are any more. After 9/11, there was a resounding moment in which we had a cosmic opening to change our course, to take the high road. We blew that one. We are still using up truckloads of money fighting wars that we know were based on lies. Why are we doing this? Even recently we could have captured Bin Laden and had a fine public trial and showcased our democratic tradition. The cowards who killed him won't even get a trail, I bet.

If history is any indication, we will pay for this dearly, at least our children and grandchildren will. What goes around comes around.

Here is a brief look into the life of Jennifer Harbury:
Jennifer Harbury -From Wikipedia Jennifer K. Harbury (born 1951) is an American lawyer, author, and human rights activist. Her personal story, writing, and activism are significant in revealing the complicity of the CIA in human rights abuses, particularly in Central America.
Harbury grew up in Connecticut, graduating from Harvard Law School and Cornell University. In 1990, Harbury met her husband Efraín Bámaca Velásquez^[1] (whose nom de guerre was Commandante Everardo). Bámaca was a Mayan commandante of the Guatemalan National Revolutionary Unity (URNG) during Guatemala's civil war,^[2] a period of brutal repression and genocide against Guatemala's indigenous populations at the time.^[3][4][5][6]
In 1992 Bámaca was "disappeared" by the Guatemalan government. As a U.S. citizen and lawyer, Harbury set out to find her husband's whereabouts by protesting and through legal action despite receiving threats on her life and safety for these efforts.^[1][2][7] Among the actions she took were two hunger strikes in Guatemala, one in front of the White House, and a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against the CIA.^[1][2]
During this period, both the Guatemalan and United States governments claimed they had no knowledge of Bámaca's whereabouts. However, as a consequence of Harbury's actions, U.S. State Department official Richard Nuccio ultimately became a whistleblower and revealed the fact that not only did the CIA know of his whereabouts, but that it had a close working relationship with the Central American death squads that were involved with his disappearance.^[7] It was revealed that on March 12, 1992, the local Guatemalan army captured Efraín Bámaca Velásquez alive, that the army had secretly detained and tortured Bámaca for over a year before killing him in September 1993 without trial, and that his torturers and murderers were paid CIA informants.^[1][2] For his whistle blowing, Mr. Nuccio was stripped of his security clearance and effectively purged from the CIA and the State Department.^[8][9]
The revelations caused a scandal for the U.S. government. As a result, in 1998 then-President Bill Clinton ordered declassification of secret archives on the Bámaca murder and other human rights crimes committed by the Guatemalan military. Clinton also issued a public apology in Guatemala for the United States' role in supporting the country's abusive regimes.^[1][4]
Since that time, Harbury has made it her life's work to fight for human rights by documenting, exposing, and speaking publicly about human rights abuses, with special attention given to abuses perpetrated by the United States both historical and contemporary.