Dear friends,
It began as a relaxing day. After a very moving morning reflection, we did some leisurely planning, caught up with friends, wrote letters to detainees, and had our pulse and blood pressure graciously checked by Helen and Ellen to make sure our bodies are handling the fast okay. Some of us caught a much-needed nap.
Then in the afternoon, we went into high gear! We performed our street theater piece at four locations spread across the city, all of them new to us. Throughout the day, our throng of traveling orange jumpsuits filled metro cars, sidewalks, buses, and public spaces. When we all piled in the free van to the Kennedy Center together, we filled so much of the vehicle that a casual observer would have thought that WAT had chartered a private van to go and enjoy a concert together. And enjoy a concert we did! We actually caught a performance by the WPAS Men and Women of the Gospel Choir before performing our own last round of street theater.
What a day! Matt characterized it with a phrase from Gandhi, often quoted by Liz McAlister: it was an adventuresome “experiment in truth.”
Peace-
Witness Against Torture
www.witnesstorture.org
**********let us know if you are interested in joining a fasters reflection conference call, scheduled for 8pm DC time on Friday – email witnesstorture@gmail.com with ‘conf call’ in the subject line, and we’ll send you the call in information***********
In this Update
1. Morning Reflection Recap by Chrissy N.
2. Creative Witness: An overview of day by Chandra R.
3. Letter from faster Beth Brockman
4. Profile of Shawali Khan by Len Goodman
5. Profile of WAT member, Justin Norman
6. How to make a donation
7. Link to article by faster Josie S. – Absurdity meets hope as Guantanamo marks 12 year
Links
- First Guantánamo parole board clears ‘forever prisoner’ for eventual transfer
- Government Secrecy Frustrates Legal Challenge To Forced-feeding of Guantanamo Prisoners
- Caught between a rock and a hard place: US must ensure safety upon release for Guantánamo prisoners
- My friend’s hunger strike against force-feeding at Guantanamo
Morning Reflection Recap
by Chrissy N.
Today Luke helped us start off our morning by sharing with one another the gratitude we feel for each other. Our circle these past few days has strengthened us, nurtured us, and given us the energy and courage with which to act. After each person in the circle shared their gratitude, Helen and I brought two pieces to the group for reflection: a short excerpt from John Dear’s The Nonviolent Life, and a piece by Beth Brockman that she wrote upon her arrival home, after having been called away from our circle.
John Dear’s words reminded us that if we are to be loving and compassionate, we must be awake, we must be mindful. Beth’s reflection was the fruit of her own mindfulness. Her reflection is included below — it is powerfully written and deserves to be read in its entirety. In it, Beth shared about her decision to return home to North Carolina less than 24 hours after arriving in DC. She shared how difficult it was to contemplate leaving this group that means so much to her, and then she shared how hearing Shaker Aamer’s words moved her deeply and convinced her that home was where she needed to be.
We in turn were moved by Beth’s words. We reflected on the work we do on behalf of people we may never meet in person, and how it is not contradictory but rather complementary work to give our care to those people we can reach out and touch. Chris reflected that in his eyes, Beth’s choice and the love that motivated it was in fact a deep and profound action to close Guantánamo.
We read Beth’s description of her connectedness to her family, to Shaker Aamer, to undocumented immigrants, and all of us who seek one another’s embrace. Tom shared that, like Beth, he participates in Witness Against Torture precisely because he can hug his family and it makes him feel the injustice of imprisoning others so that they cannot hug their children. Deb shared her belief that connectedness is essential for our survival, and her grief at how impossible it seems, even in the span of many lifetimes, that we will ever overcome the prejudice, privilege, and racism that separate us from one another. Mark reflected that in part it is grief and despair that drive him to form community with others, to live out the truth that despair and separation is not our ultimate reality, not our origin or our destiny.
So even as we mourned the loss of Beth’s nurturing, grounding presence in our circle, we gave thanks for the gift that she gave us in withdrawing.
Creative Witness: An overview of day
by Chandra R.
What moves people? What sustains a movement? What do people hold onto when faced with the despair of injustice?
The plan today was ambitious, one person even called it “audacious.” Making a few adjustments to the street theater piece that was designed and performed on Wednesday, we aimed to take on four different actions: start at the metro stop closest to St. Stephens; then head to the American Portrait Museum with our huge, beautiful image of Shaker Aamer’s face; continue to the metro stop at Foggy Bottom, right next to George Washington’s Medical School; and then make our way to the Kennedy Center concert venue. This last part was the most ambitious– we planned to do our final action inside the Kennedy Center as people were walking into the evening’s free concert.
Once again, a decent handful of passersby stopped to watch at each outdoor venue. Many took pictures and video. Some asked us questions. One WAT member trenchantly observed tonight that these actions are really just long conversations. Indeed, each action allowed those of us handing out flyers to have more extended dialogue with the public.
We all know that final adjustments in our action plans are par for the course. This was certainly the case today, especially as we arrived at our final destination, the Kennedy Center. We were a bit early and, upon entering the building, security were clearly anxious about our presence, demanding we stop right away. It was decided that we should wait until after the concert to take on the final action. We made our way in to enjoy the Kennedy Center a bit and then listen to the evening’s show: the WPAS Men and Women of the Gospel Choir.
I certainly can’t say I expected to go enjoy a concert in Washington D.C. during the week of action. And yet as we sat in the audience, most still in orange jumpsuits, it seemed so appropriate, so meaningful, that this is where we would end up at dusk on Day 4. Indeed, our day’s journey seemed filled with synergy.
Let me back up to earlier in the day. During the morning reflection, one member of our group expressed her profound grief at the intractability of U.S. racism, a sentiment that others validated. We talked about what sustains hope in the midst of despair. One person pointed up and then around him, gesturing to his faith and the collective of our group. Another mentioned finding solace in the fact that desperate social injustices are sometimes overcome quite speedily when not expected. Heinous racist institutions have been overturned and, even as they haunt the present, are distinctly different in form then they once were- American slavery and South African Apartheid, for instance.
And then, come 6pm, we sat watching a gospel choir concert at the Kennedy Center, one of the most beautiful traditions of creative witness borne of one of the most gruesome injustices of our country’s history. The Black gospel choir sang songs that testified to faith and hope, songs cultivated on plantations, sustained through the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, and still sung today.
As we made our way out to undertake our final action, an action that ends in song, we held to our message and our witness. Ours is not so different than the message and witness of slaves and their allies, of the students from Freedom Summer, and the people around the world who fought Apartheid. Guantanamo still holds men without charge, cleared for release. Let us bear witness to this travesty, invite the Guantanamo prisoner’s words and actions into our streets, our communities, our homes. Let us cry for their pain, pray and sing in hope. Let us be moved to make this atrocity, like slavery, like segregation, like apartheid, a part of our history.
Letter from faster Beth Brockman
“I worry that when I come home that my children will call for ‘Daddy’, and I will sit unmoving.” I hear these words from The Guardian article spoken in the mic-check during the dress rehearsal of the street theater this past morning, and stare at the banner of Shaker Aamer’s face that Deb painted. I remember my situation at home, the precarity with my 17-year old daughter, a senior in high school, who is going through a very rough time right now.
I had been a bit ambivalent about coming up to DC from my home in North Carolina for WAT’s Fast for Justice, but decided to come on anyway. It was obvious from the moment I stepped into the doors of St Stephen’s that I felt divided—here I was with the community of resistance I loved and felt devoted to, but had left behind my beloved family of husband, son and daughter. I had begun my liquids-only fast back home, had packed my bags with warm clothes for the freezing DC temperatures, and looked forward to seeing the friendly, familiar faces. I had longed to reconnect with old friends and was excited to meet new people and form new relationships in the WAT community, a community who has over the years come to mean so much to me. But as I gazed at Shaker Aamer’s face and heard his words from The Guardian article, I knew that I had a choice that Shaker Aamer did not. Namely, I do not have to sit unmoving; I have not forgotten my role as Mama to my children. I can go to my children when they call to me. So, when I got word from my husband on the way to the Supreme Court for the first action that he was sick and that my daughter was having an especially difficult morning, I made the tough decision to return home. I missed the street theater in front of the Supreme Court and at Union Station, as I frantically made phone calls to arrange for transportation back home. I had been in DC less than 24 hours.
On the one hand, I was devastated about leaving. But on the other hand, I was relieved to be able to do the right thing, to return to my family when they needed me. Something that Shaker Aamer, a fellow human being on this big, beautiful earth of ours, has desired for 12 long years and not been able to do. Aamer writes further in the article, “At best, we are numbers… I am 239. I even refer to myself as 239 these days. I am not sure when I will ever be anything else. It is much easier to deny human rights to those who are not deemed to be ‘human.””
Marco Saavadra, a Dreamer who lives in Brooklyn writes, “In order for us to survive and transcend the terrible days ahead of us, the country will have to turn and take me in its arms. Now, this may sound mystical, but at the bottom that is what has got to happen, because it is not a matter of giving me this or that; it is not yours to give me…The real problem is the price. Not the price I will pay, but the price the country will pay. The price a white woman, man, boy, and girl will have to pay in themselves before they look on me as another human being. The metamorphosis is what we are driving toward, because without that we will perish—indeed, we are almost perishing now.”
And so it is for Shaker Aamer, a fellow human being, a Daddy, that I respond to my children’s call, “Mama, we need you to come home.” And when I do, not only do I take them in my arms, I wrap those same arms around Shaker Aamer and Marco Saavadra, and so many others our society has referred to by number. And despite the physical distance, I will remain in spirit with the WAT community I have grown to deeply love and to call my own as we continue to fast and act during this Fast for Justice.
Profile of Shawali Khan
by Len Goodman
Shawali Khan is one of 155 men being indefinitely detained at Guantánamo Bay. He has been there now for more than nine years. He has never been charged with a crime. Moreover, the evidence against Khan is so weak that if this case were in the U.S. court system, this evidence would be insufficient to even support an arrest warrant. Yet, because Khan is alleged to be al-Qaeda, the U.S. Courts have found that the government may detain him indefinitely.
Khan is an Afghan man in his late forties who grew up on a pomegranate farm outside of Kandahar. About a year before 9/11, after a drought destroyed their crops, Khan moved with his father and brother to Kandahar City where he found work as a shopkeeper. In November of 2002, Khan was captured by Afghan warlords and sold to the Americans. At this time, the Americans were paying bounties of about $10,000 to Afghans who turned in al-Qaeda fighters. No actual evidence or corroboration was required.
Khan was subsequently sent to Gitmo based on the word of a single informant that he was an al-Qaeda fighter. The fact that Kandahar in 2002 was considered “Taliban Central” and had no known al-Qaeda presence was overlooked or ignored by American intelligence officials who were eager to fill empty cages at Gitmo.
Khan was finally granted a habeas corpus hearing in the spring of 2010, his eighth year of captivity. The government called no witnesses but merely introduced “intelligence reports” which indicated that an unidentified Afghan informant had told an unidentified American intelligence officer that Khan was an al-Qaeda-linked insurgent. Khan had been cleared for release by an Administrative Review Board at Guantánamo under the Bush administration, and had also been approved for release by the Guantánamo Review Task Force, but, when it came to his habeas petition, Judge John D. Bates refused to follow suit, allowing the Circuit Court’s instructions to persuade him that Khan’s appeal should be denied. This was in spite of the fact that the three Afghan informants relied on by the government to prove its case were no more reliable than they had ever been, and their claims were included in reports compiled by Army intelligence collectors, one of which, in Judge Bates’ words, was “perhaps the most redacted report in history.”
On September 6, 2011, the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia affirmed denial of Khan’s petition for a writ of habeas corpus.
Profile of Justin Norman
Justin grew up in the small town of Van Meter, Iowa, where he was home schooled with his three younger brothers. He taught himself to create web sites when he was growing up — a skill which he continues to use both for WAT and for work today.
Five years ago, after watching a documentary called, “The Ghosts of Abu Ghraib,” he decided to get involved in anti-torture activism. Having been raised a Christian, he thought churches would easily see the connection between the tortured, innocent Christ and tortured, innocent victims at Guantánamo. So he and his friend, Kirk Brown, wrote a presentation about two cleared detainees (Dilawar and Ahmed Errachidi) and visited over a hundred churches, offering to educate people on the torture issue for free. After the vast majority of those churches refused the presentation, Justin turned to public demonstrations as an alternative way of reaching people. His favorite of these involves a muppet and balloons.
Currently living in Des Moines, Iowa, he spends most of his free time creating short films, performing live comedy, and writing music for his bands, The Twelve Canons and Make-Believe Machines.
DONATE
Witness Against Torture is completely volunteer driven and run. We have no paid staff, but do have expenses associated with our organizing work. If you are able, please donate here.
