The Not In Our Name (NION) project

• Maoist anti-war group
• Founded by Revolutionary Communist Party member C. Clark Kissinger
• Has condemned U.S. foreign and domestic policies after 9/11

The Not In Our Name (NION) project -- a self-described "peace movement" -- was initiated on March 23, 2002 by the longtime Maoist activist C. Clark Kissinger, who is a member of the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP), a Marxist-Leninist-Maoist group calling for the overthrow of the U.S. government and its replacement with a Communist dictatorship. In 1987 Kissinger founded the radical "Refuse and Resist!", which became a member organization of NION.

The NION project produced, most notably, two documents publicly denouncing America's post-9/11 policies, both foreign and domestic. One of these documents, the NION "Pledge of Resistance," condemned "the injustices done by our government" in its pursuit of "endless war"; its greed-driven "transfusions of blood for oil"; its determination to "erode [our] freedoms"; and its eagerness to "invade countries, bomb civilians, kill more children, [and annihilate] families on foreign soil."

A separate document, the NION "Statement of Conscience," condemned not only the Bush administration's "stark new measures of repression," but also its "unjust, immoral, illegitimate, [and] openly imperial policy towards the world." According to NION, it was the American government -- and not that of any other nation -- that posed the most "grave dangers to the people of the world."

These documents received a groundswell of support from many prominent artists, academicians, and leftist activists. Among the tens of thousands to publicly endorse NION's objectives were Ed Asner, William Blum, Tom Hayden, Oliver Stone, Ossie Davis, Ruby Dee, Deepak Chopra, Danny Glover, Susan Sarandon, Jessica Lange, Tyne Daly, Martin Sheen, Alice Walker, Al Sharpton, Martin Luther King III, Gloria Steinem, Michael Albert, Michael Avery, Amiri Baraka, Phyllis Bennis, Michael Berg, Angela Davis, Michael Eric Dyson, Carl Dix, Bernardine Dohrn, Jane Fonda, Eve Ensler, Bob Bossie, Laura Flanders, Jim McDermott, Robert Meeropol, Frances Fox Piven, Michael Ratner, Pete Seeger, Leonard Weinglass, Peter Weiss, Cornel West, Howard Zinn, Ramsey Clark, Medea Benjamin, Leslie Cagan, Noam Chomsky, Mumia Abu Jamal, Matef Harmachis (of the All-African People's Revolutionary Party), Barbara Ehrenreich, bell hooks, Jesse Jackson, Michael Lerner, Tony Kushner, Spike Lee, Cynthia McKinney, Bonnie Raitt, Edward Said, and Gore Vidal. A number of signers, such as NION national organizer Mary Lou Greenberg, were RCP members.

NION's Advisory Board consisted of Russell Banks, Kimberley Crenshaw, Eve Ensler, Jeremy Glick, Abdeen Jabara, Robin D.G. Kelley, Rabbi Michael Lerner, Tony Kushner, Dave Marsh, Rev. E. Randall Osburn, Michael Ratner, Naomi Wallace, and Howard Zinn.

NION was a member organization of the United for Peace and Justice and After Downing Street anti-war coalitions. It also maintained a close alliance with the Interreligious Foundation for Community Organization (IFCO), which is a member of International ANSWER's steering committee. IFCO, which has federal tax-exempt status, served as NION's fiscal sponsor, thereby allowing donations to NION to be tax-exempt. NION also had strong ties to the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, which shared NION's same New York City address. WILPF chairperson Molly Klopot was a NION organizer, and WILPF Executive Eirector Marilyn Clement is IFCO's Treasurer.

At an October 6, 2002 NION rally, two of the specially invited guest speakers were former University of South Florida professor Sami Al-Arian, who is intimately involved with the terrorist organization Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and the radical attorney Lynne Stewart, who was convicted of illegally passing messages on behalf of her incarcerated client Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman -- the terrorist mastermind of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.

NION considered America's declared war on terrorism to be a fraudulent pretext for world conquest concocted by a power-hungry Bush administration. In NION's view, no American military success -- however large or small -- was worthy of praise. Rather, the organization deemed the United States culpable for the very problems that led to war in the first place.

Consider, for example, NION's response to the American military's December 2003 capture of former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein:

"This 'new development' in the 'war on terrorism' does not change the fact that this war is immoral, unjust, and illegitimate. It does not change the violations of international law, the lies used to justify the war ... or the tens of thousands of Iraqi lives stolen, or the hundreds of U.S. lives lost. … And as they talk about finally seeking justice for the Iraqi people by putting Saddam on trial, they will conveniently leave out any mention of the crimes done to the Iraqi people by the United States. … It was the U.S-led sanctions that killed over half a million Iraqi children since 1990. Who will put the U.S. administration on trial for war crimes?”

In July 2005, NION joined a coalition that included, among others, such notable individuals and organizations as Eve Ensler, Gloria Steinem, the Center for Constitutional Rights, Code Pink, the Culture Project, and United For Peace and Justice -- who together made a "call to shut down the Guantánamo prison camp and demand an immediate independent investigation into the widespread allegations of abuse taking place there."

Added NION: "Guantánamo has become a world-wide symbol for the current Administration's arrogant disregard of basic human rights. In the past weeks, world leaders including Presidents Carter and Clinton have joined leading human rights groups in calling for the closing of Guantánamo and other illegal prison facilities around the globe."

In the spring of 2007, NION posted on its website a tribute to Gold Star Families for Peace founder Cindy Sheehan, in recognition of her “resignation as the public face of the anti-war movement,” a movement that NION said “has been fighting to end the illegal and immoral occupation of Iraq, fighting to stop the attacks on immigrants and on the people of the world at large, and fighting to defend civil liberties.”

On March 31, 2008, NION permanently closed its national office and related infrastructure.