Vice President Mike Pence meets Iceland’s President Gudni Th Johannesson at Hofdi House in Reykjavik on September 4, 2019.
Credit: Jeremie Richard/AFP/Getty
High-powered military jets. Armed guards. Snipers on rooftops. Bomb-sniffing dogs.
Those were just some of the components of the security arsenal that accompanied U.S. Vice President Mike Pence Wednesday during his official visit to Iceland, a nation the Global Peace Index has ranked as the most peaceful nation in the world for 11 consecutive years.
As such, Pence’s heavily militarized security detail was reportedly met with shock in Iceland. The Associated Press reported that “Pence’s arrival in Iceland with military jets and armed personnel set eyes popping.”
The size and intensity of Pence’s security detail drew mockery from satirical Icelandic newspaper Fréttirnar, which joked that “Americans intended to give every Reykjavik citizen a paralyzing drug during Pence’s visit.”
Ahead of Pence’s arrival in Iceland, AP reported, U.S. Secret Service agents “spent weeks scouting locations” and “three CV-22B Osprey flew over southwestern Iceland, along with two C-130 Hercules and one Lockheed C-5 Galaxy.”
Pence, a notoriously anti-LGBTQ politician, was greeted […]
If we keep focusing on ‘ghouls and monsters in the closets, they will become living, breathing beings. I’m reviewing and learning new ways to engage in non violent communication, which I helped teach in a woman’s maximum-security prison. At first, it was unnerving to sit in a room with women who had committed crimes from murder, to assault and battery on old people, grand theft and other extreme crimes. Then it became a powerful energetic experience of woman to woman, human to human that rose up into a thirst for what affirms life. There was more power in that locked room than I’d experienced for years. I could see and feel the yearning, the fear turning into hope that peace could be found.. even in the darkest hours of night in the confines of a small barred and locked space. Within our circle of chairs.