OPPOSING TORTURE

UN TORTURE AWARENESS MONTH 2015, Google Search June 4, 2015, page one

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Torture Awareness Month - June

Every June, human rights and faith organizations join together to mark Torture Awareness Month because on June 26, 1987, the nations of the world took a major step against the immoral and abhorrent practice of torture. On that day, the Convention Against Torture and other Cruel, Inhuman and Degrading Treatment or Punishment (CAT for short) entered into force and the United Nations later declared June 26th the “International Day in Support of Victims of Torture.”

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Quick Facts

International Day in Support of Victims of Torture 2014

What do people do?

Public life

Background

Symbols

Torture and Other Ill-Treatment

In the years since 9/11, the U.S.government has repeatedly violated both international and domestic prohibitions on torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment in the name of fighting terrorism.

GOOGLE Search, CENTER FOR VICTIMS OF TORTURE, June 17, 2014

1.  CVT In the News | The Center for Victims of Torture

2.  Advocacy - The Center for Victims of Torture

3.  The Center for Victims of Torture: Home

to James

June 17, 2014 Tomgram: Ariel Dorfman, A Tale of Torture and Forgiveness I’ll bet you didn’t know that June is “torture awareness month” thanks to the fact that, on June 26, 1987, the Convention Against Torture and other Cruel, Inhuman, and Degrading Treatment or Punishment went into effect internationally. In this country, however, as a recent Amnesty International survey indicated, Americans are essentially living in Torture Unawareness Month, or perhaps even Torture Approval Month, and not just in June 2014 but every month of the year.  One simple fact of the post-9/11 era should make this clear and also boggle the mind, but has had almost no impact here. But for this you need a little background from the early years of what was once called the Global War on Terror. In addition to a stream of international kidnappings (euphemistically called “renditions”) of terror suspects, including completely innocent people the CIA snatched off the streets of global cities, as well as from the backlands of the planet and “rendered” into the hands of well-known torturing regimes (with the help of 54 other countries) and the setting up of a network of “black sites” or offshore prisons where anything went, the CIA tortured up a storm. And it did so at the behest of the top officials of the Bush administration, including the president and vice president who were convinced that it was time for Washington to “take the gloves off.” In those years, torture techniques were reportedly demonstrated in the White House to some of those officials, including the vice president and national security advisor. At the time, they went by the euphemistic, administration-approved term “enhanced interrogation techniques,” which was quickly picked up and used in the U.S. mainstream media in place of the word “torture” -- though only when the enhanced interrogators were American, of course. The bad guys out there continued to “torture” in the usual fashion.  In the Obama years, torture was (at least officially) tossed out as a useful tactic. But the torturers themselves were given a pass, every last one of them, by the Justice Department, even two cases in which the CIA’s acts of enhancement had led to death. No charge was ever brought against anyone, including the Justice Department lawyers who wrote the tortured memos endorsing those techniques and redefining torture as only happening when the torturer meant it to, or the officials who green-lighted them. Think of the Obama administration then as Amnesty National. That administration did, however, have the guts to go after one man connected to the torture program, forced a plea deal from him, andsent him to jail for two years. I’m talking about former CIA agentJohn Kiriakou, the only person since 9/11 convicted of a torture-related crime. To be specific, his criminal act was to blow the whistle on his former employer's torture program to a journalist, revealing in the process the name of a CIA agent. That was considered such an indefensible act -- in effect, an act of torture against the American security state -- that justice, American-style, was done.  It’s quite a tortuous record when you think about it, not that anyone here does anymore, which is why we need TomDispatch regularAriel Dorfman, author most recently of Feeding on Dreams: Confessions of an Unrepentant Exile, to remind us of what’s really at stake when one human being tortures another. Tom How to Forgive Your Torturer  The River Kwai Passes Through Latin America and Washington  By Ariel Dorfman What a way to celebrate Torture Awareness Month! According to an Amnesty International Poll released in May, 45% of Americans believe that torture is “sometimes necessary and acceptable” in order to “gain information that may protect the public.” Twenty-nine percent of Britons “strongly or somewhat agreed” that torture was justified when asked the same question. For someone like me, who has been haunted by the daily existence of torture since the September 11, 1973 coup that overthrew Chilean President Salvador Allende, such percentages couldn’t be more depressing, but perhaps not that surprising. I now live, after all, in the America where Dick Cheney, instead of being indicted as a war criminal, sneeringly (and falsely) claims to anyone who asks him -- and he is trotted out over and over again as the resident expert on the subject -- that “enhanced interrogations” have been and still are absolutely necessary to keep Americans safe. Click here to read more of this dispatch.

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PETITION TO PRESIDENT OBAMA VS. ILLEGAL, GLOBALLY ABHORRENT TORTURE AND KILLING, JUNE 2013

TO PRESIDENT OBAMA

WE SUPPORT YOUR DECISION TO CLOSE GUANTANAMO AND TO CLOSELY DEFINE “TARGETED KILLINGS.”  

     Our country cannot present itself to the world as a guide for others if its policies include torture and assassination.   We will always appear both brutal and hypocritical.   We appeal to you then, to go further and end torture and unconstitutional killing, end the extra-judicial, immoral practices you inherited from Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Addington, Yoo, and PNAC.  They are unworthy of a great nation.  They make us seem to the world a despicable bully, a small-country dictator, a mere Mafia boss beating up on the less powerful.   And they inspire revenge against us around the world. 

      Let us return to lawful police practices.  Let our security stand not upon illegal torture and killing, but upon our Constitution.   End CIA black sites, military torture prisons, “extraordinary rendition,” JSOC night raids and killings, drone assassinations, dumping our murder victims in the ocean.  END UNCONSTITUTIONAL, UNPRESIDENTIAL TORTURE AND KILLING.

CRIME SCENE:

PROTEST U.S./EXECUTIVE TORTURE AND KILLING

SATURDAY, JUNE 22, 2013, AT THE FEDERALBUILDING.

10 A.M. TO 11.  

INTERSECTION OF COLLEGE AND MOUNTAIN AND SIDEWALK SURROUNDING THE BUILDING. 

JOIN IN RINGING THE BUILDING ON THE SIDEWALK WITH “CRIME SCENE” TAPE TO SYMBOLIZE OUR DISAPPROVAL OF OUR GOVERNMENT’S VIOLATIONS OF LAW AND MORALITY BY UNCONSTITUTIONAL TORTURE AND KILLING.

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Contents UN Torture Awareness Month #1, June 2012
NRCAT 2012
Tassc 2011
Human Rights News
UN Conventions vs. Torture
ACLU
IBJ Legal Training and Resources
NRCAT Against Torture
Presbyterian Church
ACLU Torture Report

Contents #2 2013 Torture Awareness Month, June 2013
Crime Scene Demonstration Saturday June 22, 10 a.m., Torture Awareness Day,
     Fayetteville, Saturday, June 22 (for June 26 UN Day for Victims of Torture)
Torture Awareness Month June 2013
Methodist Church:  Torture Awareness Month June 2013
  National Religious Campaign Against Torture 2013 (NRCAT)
Episcopal Church
Google Search for Torture Awareness Month 2013
Related
Center for Victims of Torture Gitmo Review Urged
Freedom from Torture (UK)
TASSC: Torture Abolition and Survivors Support Coalition
Empathy and Torture, from The Economist
International Criminal Court
Chicago Police