Saturday, June 27, 2009

Religious campaign against torture


Activism against U.S. torture policies over the last few days didn't end with the demonstrators at the Ninth Circuit Court. The local members of National Religious Campaign Against Torture held a conference Friday evening and all day Saturday in Palo Alto.

The panelists on Friday evening, shown above included, from left to right: David DeCosse, a Santa Clara University ethicist; Dr. Jean Marie Arrigo, a social psychologist who is active in trying to turn the American Psychological Society against torture and whose research involves collecting the stories of U.S. personnel touched by U.S. torture policies; Terrence Karney, a former Army interrogator and instructor who served in the Sunni Triangle in Iraq and who repudiates torture as a tool of his trade; Ray McGovern, former CIA analyst, now working with Tell the Word, a project of the ecumenical Church of the Savior in DC; and Ben Daniel, a Presbyterian pastor in San Jose.

I can't say I learned huge amounts from this event -- except what activists always need to remember: it takes painstaking, ongoing, patient organizing to mobilize public opinion against injustice.
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While we're on the torture campaigns, take a click over to SFMike's place -- he covered the same Bybee demonstraton I dropped in on.

2 comments:

Darlene said...

I was glad to see that this issue isn't going away on SF Mike's blog. Bybee must go, John Woo should follow him and Bush and Cheney should be imprisoned. There are others responsible, too, and I don't care how long it takes, justice should prevail.

Darlene said...

Well, forgive my split infinitive. I didn't mean that the issue was on SF Mike's blog. I should have said that I was glad to see on SF Mike's blog, etc.

I have forgotten the little I knew about sentence construction, I fear. :-(