Witness Against Torture

design by Kate Kelly

…No one expects a Hilton Hotel when going to jail, neither do I desire one when traveling. Many of us had been sleeping on the floor of a local church for the previous twelve days, and I found it quite comfortable. But the conditions at Central Cell Block were deplorable. The cells were hardly bigger than the bed frame and the grimy toilet and sink combo took up most of the floor space. The beds had no pads. They were just a slab of thin metal that made an obnoxious pop sound, similar to a gunshot, every time a prisoner so much as rolled over. It had to be close to ninety degrees in the cell and the massive overhead light, which remained on all night, was reminiscent of an interrogation lamp. The room had the look and feel of an oven. Cockroaches lined the walls and vied for space on our beds, now dripping with sweat. These irritating conditions were amplified by the fact that most of us were on the twelfth day of a liquids only fast to be, in some small way, in solidarity the men who remain on hunger strike at Guantanamo to protest the illegality of their detention.

By Jerica Arents
January 24, 2010

In the absence of an intact corpse, families often gather for memorial services rather than funerals.

The families of Salah Ahmed Al-Salami, Mani Shaman Al-Utaybi, and Yasser Talal Al-Zahrani – three Guantánamo prisoners whose earlier purported suicides were declared “asymmetrical warfare” by the Bush Justice Administration – received Salah’s, Mani’s and Yasser’s broken and lifeless bodies. Previously the families had gathered to wake their loved ones, after authorities in their countries informed them that their sons had died in Guantánamo.

January 18, 2010

Taking part in Witness Against Torture’s Fast for Justice has caused me to reflect on the nature of torture and why it exists in society. For the past couple years, I have been involved in one way or another in both the movement to shut down the U.S. detention center at Guantanamo Bay and the movement to seek justice for over 20 police torture victims that still remain incarcerated in Chicago based on confessions extracted by torture by former police commander Jon Burge.

While working to end torture and its repercussions, meeting survivors of torture and participating in this fast, I have often found myself looking for rational explanations to explain both the plight of the tortured and the torturer. Many of the individuals I have known or read extensively about who have been tortured do belong to some minority or excluded group. Listening to and looking at their stories, there are some strong socio-political connections to be made. — An African-American man in racist Chicago; a bi-sexual man from an intolerant Cameroon; a Muslim man from Yemen caught in the indiscriminate and ever-expanding spider’s web of the United States War on Terror.

But Will D.C. Rally Spark Groundswell?
by Eli Saslow
October 7, 2009
Washington Post
View picture gallery Sarah L. Voisin-The Washington Post

The protesters convened for a final planning meeting, already triumphant, convinced that nine months of preparation was about to pay off. Antiwar organizers who had come to Washington from 27 states exchanged hugs inside a Columbia Heights convention hall and modeled their protest costumes: orange jumpsuits, “death masks,” shackles and T-shirts depicting bloody Afghan children. Then Pete Perry, the event organizer, stood up to deliver a welcome speech.

“This is a great moment for our movement,” he said. “We are continuing an incredible tradition.”

“Like Gandhi,” said the next speaker.

“Like Martin Luther King,” said another.

By Dana Milbank of The Washington Post

October 6, 2009

Sarah L. Voisin/Washington Post

It was a scene repeated countless times during the Bush years:

A few hundred people massed on Pennsylvania Avenue outside the White House, wearing orange jumpsuits and hoods, holding photos of wounded children or carrying coffins. They chanted antiwar slogans, acted out waterboarding and pretended to die on the sidewalk. Those who refused orders to leave the area - including ubiquitous activist Cindy Sheehan - were arrested.

But the remarkable thing about this familiar antiwar demonstration is that it occurred Monday, and the target was not George W. Bush but the White House’s current occupant. Protesters’ signs carried Obama-specific barbs: “Change? What Change?” “The Audacity of War Crimes.” “Yes We Can: U.S. Out of Afghanistan.”

By Garance Franke-Ruta

October 5, 2009

REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque

“Cheerleaders for the war refuse to acknowledge that there could be any viable strategy other than a bigger and bigger military footprint. …” the group said in the letter. “The hawks are making their position heard. Now, the majority of Americans — those of us who are for as quick and as responsible an end to the war as possible — need to make our voices heard, too.”

Alleged CPD torture victims call for new hearings

Photo: ABC 7

April 6, 2009 (CHICAGO) (WLS) — Activists and former prisoners who say they were tortured into making false confessions rallied outside the Thompson Center Monday.

They are calling on attorney general Lisa Madigan to initiate hearings for all victims of Chicago police torture under former commander Jon Burge.

Burge was indicted last year on charges related to acts of torture.

All evidence from the ICRC report suggests that Abu Zubaydah’s informant was telling him the truth: he was the first, and, as such, a guinea pig. Some techniques are discarded. The coffin-like black boxes, for example, barely large enough to contain a man, one six feet tall and the other scarcely more than three feet, which seem to recall the sensory-deprivation tanks used in early CIA-sponsored experiments, do not reappear. Neither does the “long-time sitting”—the weeks shackled to a chair—that Abu Zubaydah endured in his first few months.

Nudity, on the other hand, is a constant in the ICRC report, as are permanent shackling, the “cold cell,” and the unceasing loud music or noise. Sometimes there is twenty-four-hour light, sometimes constant darkness. Beatings, also, and smashing against the walls seem to be favored procedures; often, the interrogators wear gloves.

In later interrogations new techniques emerge, of which “long-time standing” and the use of cold water are notable. Walid Bin Attash, a Yemeni national involved with planning the attacks on the US embassies in Africa in 1998 and on the USS Cole in 2000, was captured in Karachi on April 29, 2003:

The United States tortured prisoners, according to a secret report on “The Black Sites” by the International Committee of the Red Cross [ICRC], excerpted in great detail in the new issue of The New York Review of Books. The report, whose findings are made public here for the first time, details in specific and explicit terms the various methods and “enhanced techniques” the CIA used to interrogate prisoners in a secret “global internment system” set up at the direction of President George W. Bush less than a week after the attacks of September 11, 2001. The report is summarized and analyzed in a lengthy and definitive article, “US Torture: Voices from the Black Sites.”

6 years is too long to wait! Rally, Press Conference, & Peoples Delegation: Tell Attorney General Lisa Madigan that Burge torture victims deserve new trials!

April 6, noon Thompson Center, 100 W. Randolph (at Clark)

In April 2003, Attorney General Lisa Madigan was appointed to oversee the cases of dozens of police torture victims under former Chicago Police Commander Jon Burge, who goes on trial in May.

For nearly six years, the prisoners and their families, activists, and attorneys having been asking the Attorney General to initiate evidentiary hearings for men who faced electro-shock, suffocation, beatings and mock executions in Area 2 and Area 3 police interrogation rooms.

While President Obama has ordered the closing of Guantanamo Prison due to international outcry over torture, Lisa Madigan has allowed dozens of Chicago police torture victims, all of whom are African-American, to languish in prison in Obama’s backyard.