"That which you do not resist and mobilize to stop you will learn – or be forced – to accept.”
To the Anti-War Movement in the United States:
Barack Obama is sending a surge of 20,000 troops to Afghanistan.
An antiwar movement that does not move immediately to oppose the Obama doctrine of shifting the central front of the war on terror to Afghanistan, no longer deserves to be called an anti-war movement.read more...
The World Can’t Wait organizes people living in the United States to repudiate and stop the fascist direction initiated by the Bush Regime, including: the murderous, unjust and illegitimate occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan; the global “war of terror” of torture, rendition and spying; and the culture of bigotry, intolerance and greed. This direction cannot and will not be reversed by leaders who tell us to seek common ground with fascists, religious fanatics, and empire. It can only be possible by the people building a community of resistance - an independent mass movement of people - acting in the interests of humanity to stop, and demand prosecution, of these crimes.
Spanish website
Anti-Torture
"If anyone acts like they don't know their government is torturing people on a widespread and systematic scale, they are choosing NOT to know. We have to continue to lead people to act against this -- going out to people, into classes, to institutions, and on worldcantwait.org. Too many people have learned to accept this, there is not nearly enough opposition to the revelations about these top level torture meetings -- but this is something that can change quickly if a beginning core acts with moral clarity...
We are joining the demand made by The National Lawyers Guild that John C. Yoo be fired from UC Berkeley's Boalt Hall law school, disbarred from the practice of law, and prosecuted for war crimes. John Yoo is a war criminal. This isn't about Berkeley-it's about humanity. Specifically World Can't Wait is:
Working with the National Lawyer's Guild and representatives of other groups and professors in Berkeley to make it a hotbed of protest against torture, holding programs, protests, and giving many ways for people to weigh in so that a different standard is set in society, and especially at the law school.
Organizing a campaign of letters and statements aimed at the UC administration, taking the battle to other law schools and the one million lawyers in the U.S., as well as to the wider public through a billboard in Berkeley, mass postcard distribution at law schools, film showings and letters to the editor at law journals and in newspapers."
-excerpted from speech by Debra Sweet and World Can't Wait national conference, Berkeley California, May 3 2008
On December 15, 2009, in response to the announcement that the Obama administration would be transferring detainees from Guantánamo to the Thomson Correctional Center in Illinois, Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) Executive Director Vincent Warren issued the following statement:
"If President Obama is simply moving detainees from one Guantánamo to another, he has done nothing to honor his pledge to close the prison camp. The vast majority of detainees remaining at Guantánamo will never be charged with anything. Yet the president has made clear that he believes he can continue to hold these men, most of whom have already been in Guantánamo for eight years and should never have been detained in the first place, for as long as he wants without any trial whatsoever.
On the night that Barack Obama won the 2008 presidential election, 21-year-old Mohammed el Gharani was sitting in a segregation cell in Guantanamo Bay's high security Echo Block.
He remembers the excitement among his fellow prisoners at the prospect of an Obama presidency. "Everyone was very hopeful; people were saying he was going to change things, that he would close the prison," Gharani, who was released in June, says.
"Even the guards were telling us that if he won, things would improve for us."
President Barack Obama has quietly decided to bypass Congress and allow the indefinite detention of terrorist suspects without charges.
The move, which was controversial when the idea was first floated in The Washington Post in May, has sparked serious concern among civil liberties advocates. Such a decision allows the president to unilaterally hold "combatants" without habeas corpus -- a legal term literally meaning "you shall have the body" -- which forces prosecutors to charge a suspect with a crime to justify the suspect's detention.
I've been thinking of ancient Rome recently. When it came to imperial power, Rome was known for its ruthlessness and willingness to descend to any tactic to deal with enemies. When people look back a thousand years from now, to what degree will that same image define the U.S. empire?
I thought of this after reading through the latest wave of CIA documents released at the end of August. They were full of descriptions of practices such as waterboarding, which is meant to "produce the sensation of drowning and suffocation." Or of "walling," such that a detainee is slammed "into a flexible false wall." Or of using power drills to scare prisoners. Or of how interrogators would tell prisoners that "we're going to kill your children." Or of the practice of putting "a harmless insect" into small boxes where prisoners are held. (Harmless? Like spiders?)
People tell me we've all heard enough about torture. We know what happened. But I can't help thinking that most people don't know as much as they think they do.
Binyam Mohamed, the former Guantanamo detainee, has reversed a decision to stay out of the public eye by signalling his determination to campaign for justice for prisoners at the American detention camp and highlight the lifelong effects of torture he suffered at the hands of his interrogators.
Six months after emerging as a frail and ghostly figure from the plane which brought him back to Britain from the US military prison in Cuba, Mr Mohamed last night used his first public speech since his release to explain the legacy of his seven years in detention, which he says included his "extraordinary rendition" to a prison in Morocco where his penis was repeatedly cut with a scalpel to force him to confess as an al-Qai'da terrorist.
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