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Op-Ed on Pól from a close friend Once or twice a week I answer the phone and hear a feminine robot announce “You have a collect call from an inmate in the Willacy Center. This call will be monitored and recorded.” This is followed by “hullo.” It’s an Irish accent that’s been stewed in American conversation for a quarter of a century. I’m used to hearing the voice in very different circumstances. Over the last two decades it’s been a welcome part of a community that includes my friends, family, neighbors and myself. For the past seven months the United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)-which is the old INS on steroids- has imprisoned its owner, a man named Pól Brennan. To understand his situation, imagine an episode of the “Andy of Mayberry” scripted by Franz Kafka. Pól and his wife were on their way back from visiting her mother in South Texas. There was going to be a Super Bowl party at my house and he rang from the road saying he was planning to be there. The next call was from a detention center in a place called Port Isabel. He had been stopped randomly at a checkpoint some hundred miles inside the borders of Texas. The guards had been curious about his accent and asked for his papers and Id. Upon visiting a website that listed his name on “Terror Watch” the goggle-eyed Barney Fifes figured they’d just made the bust of the year. In the Andy Griffith show, sheriff Andy would have returned from vacation and found out how the bungling deputy used some new fangled law enforcement device to lock up an innocent out-of-towner. Everything would be ironed out over coffee and Aunt Bee’s pie. Instead, in what passes today as “real life,” a vortex of mean spirited, short sighted and self-centered agencies began to suck the atmosphere dry- not only of the essence of justice and reason, but also any trace of amusement. Those who have had a loved one taken hostage would understand the response of Pól's family and friends. We tried to speak gently and act respectfully, as in “perhaps you misunderstand, good sir, this gentleman is of no use to you. Please release him and I am sure we can work out your grievances.” We suppressed media attention, for fear embarrassment would energize the government’s prosecution. We hoped and prayed for the best. The lumbering juggernaut of the law does not respond to wishful thinking, it seems. Bail was denied. The government prosecutors confided to Pól's attorney, Jim Byrne, that they had orders from Washington to go hard. I was introduced to my friend in the early eighties. He was the boy friend of the owner of my goddaughter’s day care center. In the early nineties, I was told that the FBI had arrested him. That was the first I heard of his history. It turns out he was not Paul Morgan who I wrongly guessed was hiding out from the Irish Republican Army, but Pól Brennan, a rather infamous member of the Republican Movement. He was in fact one of the still at large escapees from the notorious British prison, Long Kesh/ Maze, scene of the blanket protest, fatal hunger strikes and then the largest jailbreak in British and Irish history. I was not a big part of the movement that organized to free Pól over the next five years. However, I was impressed how he resisted pressure to submit to extradition and serve out his sentence in British prisons. At times this pressure came not only from the courts in England and the United States, but his family and attorneys as well Pól's tenacity served him well. In 1998 the Good Friday Agreement, brokered in part by President Clinton, allowed his case to be dropped by the Crown. He served out the various related U.S. complaints and by 1999 he was back living with his wife in north Berkeley. We hooked up again and began hanging out and working together as carpenters. We passed our free time in the scene near my house, a park that serves as a dog discotheque. It’s a field where our puppies and dogs leap, run, spin, wrestle and roll. They are sort of the spirit youth of their graying owners, who mingle on the sidelines. Pól was my principal support while I rebuilt my family’s house. He lent advice, encouragement and the occasional bout of intensive labor over that three-year ordeal. He endeared himself to my wife and two sons and fit himself into the countless barbeques and gatherings we parents mark the school year by. He and his wife are splendid cooks and we ate heartily at one another’s tables. We shared enthusiasm for books, like The Ragged Trousered Philanthropist and movies like Dr. Strangelove. Pól introduced me to the constellations and planets on the clear nights available to his handmade 13” reflecting telescope and us I emphasize the non-political aspect of my relationship with Pól. However, I believe that he was then, and is now, a political prisoner. I flatter myself that I would have acted just as he had in the circumstances he was raised in. The central beef of the catholic Long Kesh inmates was that they were prisoners of war, not criminals. Thus the “Blanket Protest” where IRA detainees went without clothes for four years rather than wear prison uniform and the hunger strikes that followed. The last episode claimed ten lives and altered world opinion of the Northern Irish “Troubles.” I don’t see that as the behavior of criminals any more than what a group of disaffected colonists did to bring a company of redcoats down in Concord, Massachusetts a while back. Tales of heroic rebels throwing off British rule were a part of my school curriculum and TV shows like Disney’s Johnny Tremaine a major family entertainment. I was raised in the military and organizing to fight for liberty and justice was what my father and everyone around us did for a living. So I don’t have a problem accepting Pól's past as an honorable thing any more than I do my father’s, uncle’s, brother’s and nephew’s war service. Ambrose Bierce cynically defined the noun rebellion as “a failed revolution: disaffection’s inability to substitute bad government for misrule.” That being said I do respect the intention and courage of people like Pól, as well as the Salvadoran or Nicaraguan men I’ve worked with who bear bullet scars from petered out conflicts. I admire my classmates who went to Viet Nam, as the song says, for our senior trip- as well as the aging ex-soldiers they fought against. They no doubt caused suffering and suffered in turn, but they did so as consequence of war. They were rebels, revolutionaries or plain soldiers, not criminals. Nor is Pól Brennan a criminal. There are specific agencies responsible for Pól's incarceration. They have names, faces and organizational charts. Many of them are private corporations, such as the (company) that runs the several camps Pól has been transferred to and from over the last two months. They have no concern for the pain and sadness ripping through their prisoner’s family and community. A corporation owes allegiance only to its shareholders. That allegiance itself is bound within the narrow ink of immediate profit. Faith, science, reason, law and the constitution, where they restrict the hands of acquisition, are not part of the equation. There is no incentive to release Pol. The taxpayers pay per body, and the needs of the corporation demand they keep the camps full. The people running the camps at every level are the opposite of honorable public servants. Their duty is to profit, although the guards barely clear minimum wage. It’s as if the promoters of this system read Joseph Heller’s Catch Twenty Two, and found no irony in the character and antics of Milo Minderbinder. If you’ve read this far, you are part of the choir I am preaching to. I’m asking now for a response. There is a lever still available to us. A hundred letters on the desk of a Congressman, along with calls, emails and personal contacts, can get a cased moved up the agenda of most politicians. Please take the time to learn more about Pól's case and to write to your representatives in the state and federal levels of government. Make your friends aware*. There will be a benefit for Pól on September 21st at the Starry Plough from 2 to 6 in the afternoon. September 25th happens to be the 25th anniversary of escape from Long Kesh. Write to Pól or buy him a book. Look at your children and promise them a future where love, liberty, security and prosperity abide. Then take solid steps to fulfill that promise. Randy. Barbara Lee, Representative 9th District California Elaine McKellar, Senior Case Worker 1301 Clay St., Suite 1000-N Oakland, CA 94612 Joanna Volz (Pol’s wife) P.O. Box 3684 South Padre Island, TX 78597
Pól Brennan
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