The Conscientious Objector

Joshua Casteel will be the keynote speaker at Pax Christi NJ’s upcoming spring assembly to be held on March 28, 2009 at Felician College in Lodi, NJ. Joshua will also be making himself available for other speaking engagements at the end of March. For more information or to book Joshua contact
Kathy O’Leary 908-273-0751 kathy-wargo@comcast.net

About Joshua Casteel
Joshua is a former interrogator at Abu Ghraib turned conscientious objector and a recent convert to Catholicism. He gave witness at Winter Soldier and traveled to Rome in March of 2007 with the Catholic Peace Fellowship to meet with Pope Benedict XVI and members of the Vatican to advance the issue of conscientious objection. He is featured along with Camilo Mejia and six other CO’s in the documentary Soldiers of Conscience which will air on PBS’s P.O.V. on October 16th.

His book Letters from Abu Ghraib is available on Amazon.com and Small Press Distribution.

Videos of Joshua Casteel

Here are two DVD documentaries I ran into at work that people may be interested in.

The first documentary is called "Run Granny Run", directed by Marlo Poras, and it's about Doris Haddock's run in 2004 for the U.S. Senate in New Hampshire. Doris Haddock is a 97 year old woman who has had a long history of activism: in the 1930s, she performed one-woman feminist plays; in 1960, she took part in helping to stop nuclear testing near an eskimo fishing village; in 2000 she walked across America to promote finance campaign reform. In 2004, an unexpected vacancy occurred in the Democratic candidate for the Senate in New Hampshire and Doris Haddock decided to try to run. I admired her courage in taking that chance, and when I see her perserverance in spite of the condescension of the Republican incubent and the condescension of her own party to her candidacy, it inspires me. There's one scene with Howard Dean that especially gets me boiling. My favorite part was the Senatorial debate, where she turned out to be an articulate voice for Progressive values.