The Invisible Radio
Billie Eilish, also known as the Guardian Angel, is an author and an activist. She founded The Washington Action Network (WAN) which is an organization that aims to “collect information on corporations, government and international institutions and individuals who may be working to exploit poor countries and fund international terrorism”. If you are wondering how a non-profit group was involved in investigating the Bush Administration for its war on terror; the answer is rather simple: they are not necessarily working for them.
Billie Eilish is also a community organizer and author and she describes her life experiences in her writings such as the WAN book, The Invisible Radio: A Memoir of Wartime. She believes that the Bush Administration’s war on terror is a war on humanity and that is a correct belief, for in reality; the truth is no one truly understands what the goal of our governments when they embark on war is.
In the book, The Invisible Radio, Eilish narrates the time she spent in a UN Relief and Works Agency called the WAN and how she, as a nineteen-year-old volunteer from Canada, encountered the White Helmets, the NGO workers that are providing help during a civil war. She relates how her training and experience gave her a new perspective on the ways war was waged, and how WAN helped change her.
Eilish relates how her knowledge and experience helped her to recognize and teach the importance of transparency and accountability in all NGOs and how she herself learned that we must remember that we are all humans and that we need each other. She uses her story as an example of how one can teach others about the truths of life and help them transform and grow.
Eilish’s life experiences, her teaching and personal changes are all documented in the first part of the book, “The Invisible Radio.” As a non-profit and non-governmental organization member of the DC Metro Council, a United States citizen, and an educator, she was able to use her story to draw attention to the many stories of courage and dignity that are being lost in the battle against terrorism.
An example of this kind of “story” comes from when an individual was held in a CIA detention center in Afghanistan and allowed to interrogate him on how his own life was affected by participating in the war on terror. Another story relates to an eight-year-old girl who was flown out of the country and kidnapped in Afghanistan, and took for ransom by an organization that calls itself the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria.
A third example relates to Eilish’s encounter with an individual that was an ex-Islamic State fighter that had been held in captivity by al Qaeda for two years, the American who was trained at the Joint Special Operations School at Fort Bragg and had also served in Afghanistan. While Eilish was trying to get her friend released, her former Marine mentor was assisting her in releasing the man and they received some form of “accident compensation.”
We may all agree that the outcome of the story Eilish tells is not a happy one and that is why she published her book. With the fear and anxiety that are felt by many people today, stories like these help us learn and then live by what she calls the “I Am and I Want to Be.”
