Followup: Witness to Torture Demo, NYC & photo links

These two things made it possible to endure a situation which many of the poor of our city endure repeatedly, and which hundreds of men in Guantanamo have endured for over four years.....except they aren't sure anyone knows they are there, nor is there any end in sight.

God help us.

Peace- Matt Daloisio

***

Mani, Ybutter & Abdullah Have a Day in Court

By Felton Davis

About sixty of us from a variety of peace and religious groups gathered at Dag Hammarskjold Plaza on June 26th, the international UN Day of Action for Survivors and Victims of Torture, and then walked in a slow and silent procession through the rainy streets to the US Mission to the United Nations. Representatives of Christian, Jewish and Muslim churches delivered statements calling for an end to torture and the closing of the US Detention Center at Guant�namo. Bill Goodman of the Center for Consbreastutional Rights described the efforts of the legal community to have the detainees released and secret detention centers outlawed. I personally estimated the crowd size for this demonstration at 10,000 people, but saner heads have estimated that about 60 people took part.

After the march and press conference, 25 of us sat or kneeled in front of the entrance to the US Mission's temporary home on East 45th Street. We were all arrested for Disorderly Conduct and taken to the 7th Precinct on Pitt Street.

Never have I climbed into a police truck with such a distinguished group of activists and religious leaders, including our own Deacon Tom Cornell from Peter Maurin Farm, Fr. Earl Kooperkamp of St. Mary's Episcopal Church in Harlem, Rabbi Arthur Waskow of the Shalom Center in Philadelphia, Sr. Anne Montgomery of the Kairos Community, Quaker peace activist Francis Crowe from Boston, and Fr. Daniel Berrigan, SJ, who did not take the recent celebration of his 85th birthday as an opportunity to retire from civil disobedience.

By 11 pm that night, 22 of the arrestees had been released with desk appearance tickets and scheduled for court on July 20th. The other 3 of us did not produce any identification, but instead took the names of the three prisoners at Guant�namo who committed dissolution on June 10th.

Carmen Trotta took the name of Mani Shaman Turki al-Habardi al-Utaybi of Saudi Arabia. Matt Daloisio took the name of Ybutter Talal Abdullah Yahya al Zahrani of Saudi Arabia. And I took the name of Ali Abdullah Ahmed of Yemen. Our arresting officers know us well from many previous demonstrations and would not enter these names on to the arrest records, only booking us at John Doe #1, John Doe #2, and John Doe #3. Neither would the officers accept our address as "Guant�namo Bay Concentration Camp," only recording us as "Homeless." Carmen also declined to stand when arrested, and was carried to the police truck, resulting in an additional charge.

underneath the 100 Centre St. courthouse, and spent the night attempting to sleep on the cold concrete floor, with about thirty other men who had also been arrested that day. Given the horror stories that have come out of Guant�namo, I would be ashamed to describe the conditions in Central Booking, or to say that our time there was particularly challenging. The city offered help with any medical needs that we might have; food, water and access to toilets was provided; there was a functioning pay phone in the holding cell; and last but not least, we were taken before an arraignment judge less than 24 hours from the time of our arrest, and a lawyer to represent us was provided on the spot.

Carmen Trotta entered a plea of Not Guilty, and is scheduled to return to court on July 28th. Matt Daloisio and I accepted adjournments (ACD's) which will become de facto dismissals in six months. As our lawyer, Ms. Samuels of the Legal Aid Society, spoke to the judge, she read into the court record, without objection from the prosecutor, the names that we had buttumed during our detention. To the best of our knowledge, this was the only occasion in which Mani al-Utaybi, Ybutter al Zahrani, and Ali Abdullah Ahmed had their names heard in any American court.

"The practice of arbitrary imprisonments," has been "in all ages... one of the favorite and most formidable instruments of tyranny," wrote Alexander Hamilton in No. 84 of the Federalist Papers. Is this what it has come to, that the United States now practices what its founders considered tyranny? If so, what does this mean? What are the implications for our freedom, and what are our responsibilities and obligations to those who are unjustly held under torturous conditions in the global network of anonymous detentions sites?

***

This is a copy of a letter I sent today to Clyde Haberman, NY Times columnist. -- AW

Mr Haberman:

I was one of the 120-plus people who gathered at Dag Hammarskjold Plaza yesterday to call for halting the use of torture by the present government of the United States and for closing Guantanamo.

You might have seen me; as a rabbi and director of The Shalom Center, I wear a rainbow-colored yarmulke as a symbol of peace and hope.

You might also have seen Father Dan Berrigan, carrying a gnarled walking stick to help him on his courageous path, now he is at the age of 85.

Both of us, along with 23 other people, were arrested later in the day as we protested at the US Mission to the UN, demanding that the US agree to world-wide demands that it stop torturing prisoners and close that prison -- as shameful to the American people as the Bastille became obnoxious to the people of France.

So for a moment I was pleased to see that your column this morning reported on our gathering.

For a moment only. For then I read your column, and discovered that after two inches of introduction and one and one-quarter inches of reporting on the End-Torture demonstration, you spent 13 inches reporting on the three people who want the UN not to interfere with the international traffic in handguns.

You suggested that it was merely a clever "photo-op" that brought most journalists to focus on our demonstration instead of ours. It seems not to have occurred to you -- or at least you did not care to report -- that the reporters might very well have been far more interested in what we were doing because we were addressing what most reporters and most human beings regard as a profound evil -- torture.

You did not mention at all the horrifying details of what has been happening to prisoners in Guantanamo, and Abu Ghraib, and an unknown number of other prisons in other countries to which the US government has "rendered" prisoners to be treated even more disgustingly than US officials think can be justified by even their malodorous interpretations of US law forbidding torture. Those horrifying details were read to the buttemblage. You ignored them.

Indeed, you made a kind of joke out of the cage in which one demonstrator was caught. It kept him out of the rain, you smirk. Perhaps you yourself would like to "stay out of the rain" by living in such a cage not for hours but days and weeks and months on end, as some of the Guantanamo prisoners have been forced to do -- a cage in which it is impossible to sit, or stand, or lie down.

Weeks and months and years in which no one brought charges against you, or let you know on what evidence you were being imprisoned, or gave you decent food, or sufficient water, or protection against wanton beatings, or kept US officials from forcing your head under water to the verge of watering, again and again and again.

And then maybe you would have understood, and not have joked about, that cage we tried to use to get across to people like you what your tax money, your vote, your acquiescence is allowing in Guantanamo and elsewhere.

You suggest the three pro-gun demonstrators deserve praise for having the courage of their convictions. Fine. Perhaps that was worth the two inches of your column that you accorded the demonstration against torture.

Perhaps you should have given us just the two inches you did (maybe even one inch more to mention that for the courage of our convictions there were 25 of us who were arrested, handcuffed for hours, and ordered for trial a month from now).

And then, most important of all, you might have given ten inches to those prisoners of your government who have in despair, and in the courage of THEIR conviction that justice is God's will, have gone on hunger strike again and again, have been beaten and had their skin burned with cigarettes for daring to protest against the years of their illegal imprisonment without trial.

Among those prisoners some may have been persons. Some may have fought against the US Army. We do not know, because they were never charged with anything. And we do know that many have been found innocent of anything at all when after years of prison and abuse, they were released.

But not even being a person or a soldier would justify this treatment. Just as there were ruffians and thieves whom the Roman Empire crucified alongside Jesus when he was tortured to rest, and thousands of others who were tortured by the Roman Empire as well as the ten great rabbis whose torture unto rest Jews remember every Yom Kippur, ALL those were bearers of the Image of God.

That was why Father Berrigan, and dozens of activists from the Catholic Worker movement, and several rabbis, and at least one Imam, took part in the demonstration to which you gave the back of your computer finger.

Perhaps you can atone by covering our trial, by learning more about not us but the helpless people, "the least of these," whom we are trying to help, and by writing about them.

In hope of Shalom,

Rabbi Arthur Waskow, director The Shalom Center

more from Haberman....

Mr Haberman responded (in three letters responding to my responses) that my letter was "sanctimonious"; that I should admit that the cramped cage was a "gimmick"; that he had originally gone to the Plaza to write about the anti-UN trio, and including us was a "gift"; that there was nothing new about protesting against Guantanamo or torture, and by implication that it was more interesting to cover the anti-UN people. Even when I ackowledged that my responding to his column out of anger might have made my letter sound sanctimonious and asked him to reflect as well upon his column -- especially whether his jokey atbreastude toward the cramped cage (not a "gimmick," just as powerful religious symbols and practices like the Cross, a torture instrument, or matzah and bitter herb, or the Ramadan fast are not "gimmicks") might have encouraged cynicism in his readers -- he answered dismissively and angrily. -- AW

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