01/10/11 – Frida Berrigan – The Scott Horton Show

All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton, and our next guest is Frida Berrigan from Witness Against Torture.
That's witnesstorture.org.
Welcome back to the show, Frida.
How are you?
I'm very well.
It's good to be with you, Scott.
You know what?
I never can keep track of where you work anymore.
Can you please give us a better introduction of yourself than I just gave you?
Oh, no, that's pretty accurate.
I'm an organizer with Witness Against Torture.
Until recently, I was working at the New America Foundation, an arms and security initiative, but I'm now organizing full-time with Witness Against Torture and also with the War Resisters League.
The War Resisters League.
Okay, wonderful.
All right, so I got this in my email this morning.
Seems pretty important, especially for people on the East Coast listening to get an earful.
Close Guantanamo with justice now.
It's a day of action against torture and extra-legal detention.
Please tell us.
Sure.
Well, tomorrow is Tuesday, January 11th.
It marks the ninth year of indefinite detention, of torture, of cruel and unusual punishment for the men at Guantanamo, men brought from Afghanistan and the border regions of Pakistan in the early days of the United States' so-called war on terror and brought to Guantanamo in early 2002.
On January 11th, 2002, the first men, about 20 men, were brought to Guantanamo.
And as your listeners well know, in the last nine years, more than 1,000 men have gone through Guantanamo, gone through the Bush administration's sort of extra-legal experiment in the hope that putting these men in Guantanamo in a foreign country, sort of illegal for the people from the United States to go to, sort of outside of the American consciousness, that we would just sort of forget about these people.
And Witness Against Torture, along with other groups, has been trying very hard to help the American people not forget about these men and to call the lie, you know, Donald Rumsfeld told us, that these are the worst of the worst, that these are, you know, the people that we should be very, very afraid of.
And, of course, what turned out is that most of them are people who happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time and were brought to Guantanamo subjected to terrible mistreatment and torture, and now there are 173 men left in Guantanamo.
And the Bush administration's extra-legal experiment has become the Obama administration's albatross.
One of his first acts as President of the United States, President Obama signed an executive order saying that he would shut down Guantanamo within a year.
And, of course, it's nearly two years since that promise and that commitment, and he has completely failed in that endeavor.
And more than failed, he's exported the Guantanamo experiment to Afghanistan, where it has enlarged.
There are hundreds and hundreds of men and women in indefinite detention throughout Afghanistan.
And the human rights community is just beginning to learn the names of those people and very little advocacy has been done on their behalf.
Anyway, for all of these reasons, witnesses against torture and other groups have identified January 11th as a day of national shame, a day when we should stop and think about what's being done in our name to the bodies of men at Guantanamo, to the bodies of men at Bagram and other detention facilities in Afghanistan, and to the families of these people who haven't seen their fathers, their brothers, their husbands in nine years.
So we come with a renewed urgency and, in fact, some degree of new alarm, recognizing that given the political climate, this is kind of our last opportunity.
We're entering the 10th year of Guantanamo, and if it doesn't shut down this year through our efforts, Congress isn't moving on this issue.
The President's initiatives are dead in the water.
The Justice Department is caught up in bureaucratic inertia.
All these institutions are failing, and it's really up to the people of this country to demand that this end.
And if it doesn't happen this year, we're in grave danger of this just kind of being part of the new landscape.
And an accepted fact, yep, the United States tortured, the United States detained people indefinitely.
The United States, you know, is comfortable with this, and we're acting on the 11th to say we are very uncomfortable with this.
And, in fact, we're so exercised and so outraged that not only are we going to act on the 11th, but we have more than 100 people, Scott, who will be fasting from the 11th through the 22nd of January, the date two years ago, almost two years ago, that President Obama signed this executive order saying that he'd remove the taint of Guantanamo and end this horror and then the practice of torture.
So that's what we're doing.
We begin on the 11th and go through the 22nd.
Right on now.
So that's meet in front of the White House tomorrow, Tuesday, January 11th, beginning at 11 a.m., right?
That's right.
So we'll meet there.
We have a rally with lawyers from the Center for Constitutional Rights, advocates from Amnesty International, Andy Worthington, independent journalist.
My hero.
From the U.K. will be there.
He's over in this country talking about his new book, Stories from Guantanamo, Outside the Law.
So he'll be speaking.
We'll read a letter from Omar Dey's case, one of the men released from Guantanamo.
And then from there we'll march to the Department of Justice.
It's about a mile from the White House.
We'll march over there and we'll have a demonstration there at the Department of Justice and direct action there.
And then each day for the next 11 days we'll be in front of the Department of Justice, we'll be in front of the White House, we'll be acting at other sites around Washington, D.C., and then be in touch with this larger community of people acting in Chicago, in Des Moines, in Portland, Maine, in Miami, Florida, and all these different sites throughout the country acting for justice throughout these two weeks.
Well, you know, Obama and his team and his defenders like to say that it's the Republicans in Congress who won't let him get this done.
But Glenn Greenwald had a piece just a few months back where he had found a quote from Obama's team saying that what they need to do is try their best to make it look like they're trying to close Guantanamo for the progressive left-wing base here in America and for the foreigners to see that they're trying, but they're not really trying.
Yeah, we see a lot of window dressing and very little action.
For the men at Guantanamo, for men, you know, 60, 70 of them who have been cleared for release, who have been determined both by the Bush administration and in a separate review by the Obama administration to pose no threat to the United States, they have never harbored even ill will towards the United States, much less organized against the United States in any sort of way.
For all of these people, the election of President Obama, the signing of the six-decade order, this means nothing.
So they're going through the motions, they're sort of putting up the rhetoric, and in fact the Bush administration was releasing men from Guantanamo much more quickly than the Obama administration has.
So it's very disappointing and it's also instructive, you know, that we shouldn't believe the promises of our leaders and we should be prepared at every turn to hold them accountable to what they say and to pressure them and push them to do what they're promising.
Well, and you know, Freda, as I know you well know, it's not just the indefinite detention and the lawless system at Guantanamo.
It's the torture, too, at Bagram and elsewhere in Afghanistan.
It's been credibly reported time and again that the Army, we don't know what the CIA is doing really at all, but we know that the Army is still torturing people by the guidelines in Appendix M of the rewritten Army Field Manual.
So Obama is still presiding over torture.
That's right.
You know, people think that at least that is over, but it's not.
That's right.
All right.
Well, everyone on the East Coast who could possibly get there tomorrow, Tuesday morning, 11 a.m., Witness Against Torture.
WitnessTorture.org.
Thank you so much, Freda.
Good to be with you, Scott.
Thank you.