Hating Bad Orange Man More Than Gaza Genocide You're Funding?

It's hard for me to understand how people could be more upset about the potential return of the bad orange man than about currently funding the pulverizing of children sheltering in a school. 

When I say pulverizing I mean the people who died at the Tabi'een School on August 10 were unrecognizable in death.

https://x.com/DrMadsGilbert/status/1822771505903882496

These days I often think of Orwell's, 1984, where he has the protagonist grappling with this conundrum: 

The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command. 

It's hard to make this happen without torturing someone, so our corporate overlords' long term strategy has been to control the evidence that reaches your eyes and ears. 

It's why shouting "Free Palestine!" at a campaign event for VP Harris will get you dragged away by security and dissed from the podium. Also threatened with the return of the bad orange man you love to hate.

If you've managed to get off the corporate news feed approved by the oligarchy, your eyes and ears have seen and heard evidence of horrifying things. Many of your neighbors and your old friends do not know these things because they rely on the New York Times or CNN or Fox to get "news."  

Trigger warning: sexual assault, violence targeting children

https://x.com/martyrabuh/status/1821305985509814650

For instance, the systematic torture of imprisoned -- including being sodomized, in some cases raped to death, by Israeli soldiers -- that is official Israeli policy.

https://x.com/OmarBaddar/status/1815428315915973042

For instance, the routine killing of children by snipers who know exactly who they're aiming at.

https://x.com/Glia_Intl/status/1819711401469894769

For instance, the epidemic diseases like polio ravaging Gaza as health infrastructure has been deliberately destroyed throughout the strip.

Displaced Palestinian children queue to for food distributed by aid organizations in Beit Lahia, Gaza. Israel's allies have condemned Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich for calling the starvation of Palestinians "just and moral." Abood Abusalama/Middle East Images/AFP via Getty Images - Source: Newsweek

For instance, starvation and deprivation of potable water as a deliberate policy in Gaza.

For instance, the fact that U.S. factories make the bombs and the warplanes used to destroy Gaza, and U.S. taxpayers pay for them.

Hate is a thrilling emotion, and fear is a powerful motivator. Glenn Greenwald reminded us that Orwell described the "orange man bad" strategy aptly in Animal Farm where the ascendent pigs threaten the other animals with the prospect of the farmer coming back.

Corporate news constantly hypes the orange man as a threat -- but isn't his name being constantly in the "liberal" media a hint that he'll be elected again (and isn't that what all those trials were really about?). That's how he won in 2016 and how I knew he'd get the Republican nomination in 2024.

I hate fascist government and I'm scared of what it does to the most vulnerable (and, eventually, all of us). But none of the celebrities who are elevated to a position to be official spox scare me as much as the genocide they run interference for.

Superior Force: An Inferior Method Of Survival

What becomes of an empire as it sinks into a depraved desire to expand and, ultimately, survive at any cost? This is the question on my mind since I finished Orhan Pamuk's tome Nights of Plague which some reviewers called a work in three genres: historical novel, murder mystery, and political allegory.

Pamuk lives and writes in Türkiye, rump of the once powerful Ottoman Empire. He's often in trouble with his government for not depicting their antecedents splendidly enough -- as for instance when he acknowledged the Armenian genocide and was placed under house arrest as a result. This time he's accused of mocking Atatürk, the founder of modern Türkiye. But the events of his new novel, set as the Ottoman Empire sputters out, are as imaginary as its physical setting: an island besieged by bubonic plague.

It was impossible for me to read this book without noticing the many parallels to my own failing empire. 

When spying and surveillance become the way to hold on to power long after rulers have lost the confidence of the ruled, I think of the U.S. Not only informers but technology-based surveillance of every phone call (thank you, Edward Snowden), every email (no thank you, Google), and every social media post is the fuel our sputtering empire runs on. We've now seen firsthand evidence that Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and other platforms are deeply infested by U.S. alphabet agencies like the CIA, FBI, and NSA -- one might even say, controlled by them.

Fake news? Dying empires specialize in it. The inability to reflect on blunders and correct course is baked in to imperial hubris. This guarantees more mistakes and the kind of poor decisions that hasten one's demise. For example, a series of failed wars in the Middle East and 800+ military outposts in other nations that are economically, morally, and environmentally unsustainable. Extreme weather events batter us while the empire continues pumping greenhouse gasses out at an alarming rate to maintain its self-appointed dominance. And funding failed rocket launches that trash the environment while government entities like the FAA look away.

Inability to manage public health in an atmosphere of suspicion and deliberate misinformation by governments who must proclaim their glory (whether D or R flavored) characterizes our day. When almost no one trusts government at all levels, the only way to get people to cooperate with it is through fear and intimidation. These methods are notoriously bad at promoting healthy outcomes.

Which brings us to torture.

A central conflict is Pamuk's book is the tension between methods of solving a crime such as murder. The Ottoman method is to decide who the culprits are, then torture them until they confess. The Sherlock Holmes method (the reigning sultan is a fan) is to use deductive reasoning to discover the culprits. Our modern Turkish novelist paints these as "East" versus "West" and indeed this lens was prevalent at the turn of the 20th Century. But is that still accurate today?

Who bombed the Nord Stream pipeline? Only examine the obfuscation and determination not to know the answer to see what "the West" has come to. 

Where did SARS-CoV-2 come from? Many have concluded based on the evidence that it was invented in a lab especially its highly significant gain-of-function ability to be spread via aerosols. The U.S. government in particular has distinguished itself in spreading false information and in punishing those who offer a counter narrative, or even those who wonder aloud if the official narrative is plausible.

On World Press Freedom Day our thoughts are with the many journalists who suffer severe consequences for their work

In particular we think of our own Julian Assange, detained for more than 13 years and facing a 175 year sentence if extradited to the US for revealing war crimes… pic.twitter.com/YKl0LRUBze

— WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) May 3, 2023

Julian Assange is the most visible victim of torture inflicted for telling the truth about U.S. war crimes. His torment is meant as a warning to us all: practice actual journalism and prepare to forfeit your freedom, your health, even your life. As the torturers signal their false respect for press freedom and journalists.

Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo stand as exemplars of torture regimes that even an Ottoman sultan would admire. But once instilling fear in others reaches the level of terrorizing, the information gained is practically worthless.  The cruelty of extraordinary rendition as a fishing expedition for possible future informants and infiltrators is a source of pride for the twisted individuals responsible.

Plausible deniability is also as U.S.ian today as it was once Ottoman. Pamuk's sultan gets rid of political enemies by making sure they're murdered far away from the capitol by agents whose actions cannot be traced back to the head of state. Similarly, the U.S./NATO proxy war on Russia via Ukraine has been a huge disinformation success. My venal senator Susan Collins just sent me email claiming we're there to defend democracy (in one of the least democratic of European nations) and to respond to Russia's "unprovoked" invasion of the Donbas region.

But sure let's keep claiming that Russia is the one shelling the nuclear power plant in Zaporizhzhia that they've controlled for a year now. By refusing to see the truth that Ukraine is doing the shelling (with U.S. or NATO equipment), we also refuse to understand how to stave off a possible meltdown. 

Our hands are tied by our own lies.

When the application of force is seen as the solution to any and all problems, your society is bound to fail. Because many problems -- like pandemics -- cannot be solved by force. Education, persuasion, and confidence that leaders can make tough but beneficial public health decisions are the stuff of public health management. In their absence, the infection rages on.

9/11 And Covid-19 Have A Lot In Common

Protesters in Kabul December, 2021 demanding "Let us eat" and "Give us our frozen money" Source: Al Jazeera Photo: Mohd Rasfan/AFP

The demise of the U.S. empire is foretold by mass suffering in Afghanistan 20+ years after the unfortunate events of 9/11.

More than half of Afghanistan’s 39 million people need humanitarian help and six million are at risk of famine. More than a million children are “estimated to be suffering from the most severe, life-threatening form of malnutrition” and could die without proper treatment.. 

-- Martin Griffiths, Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coodinator, to the United Nations Security Council August, 2022 as reported in Al Jazeera.

$7,000,000,000 in Afghan government assets were frozen by the U.S. when the Taliban returned to power in Afghanistan amid a messy, embarrassing withdrawal of U.S. forces in 2021. Now, in 2022, many nations have responded by going off the dollar, a process hastened by economic sanctions that have ramped up in the proxy war against Russia in Ukraine.

Sold as a humanitarian intervention, what was two decades of war in Afghanistan really about? 

Some things are best understood in retrospect.

That nearly 3,000 "Americans" (27 were actually foreign nationals) died in the World Trade Center was a fact repeated as often as the videos of both towers collapsing. Oh, and WTC Building 7 which collapsed 8 hours later. This magnitude of death was the pretext for going to war on Afghanistan which allegedly harbored the Saudi masterminds of the terrorist attack. Except it was Pakistan doing the harboring. But they have nuclear weapons, don't they?

The main things that 9/11 provided were an enormous spectacle to justify the endlessly profitable wars of imperial expansion for the U.S., sometimes doing business as NATO.

The other signficant thing that 9/11 provided cover for was the 300 page so-called Patriot Act which gutted constitutional rights of citizens and terrorists alike. Swiftly gutted them, and created the Department of Homeland Security and created ICE -- both of which we had gotten along without prior to 9/11.

A lot of torture happened after 9/11. No, not the torture of being an Afghan or Pakistani child trying to sleep while surveillance robots droned overhead 24/7 waiting to unleash their Hellfire missiles on your home. Torture in secret prisons and in the gulag known as Guantánamo which is on Cuba's territory without their consent.

Torture then led to persecution of torture whistleblowers. 

Persecution amounting torture of Chelsea Manning for refusing to reveal how she shared evidence of U.S. war crimes. 

Persecution amounting to torture of Julian Assange for sharing evidence of U.S. and allied forces' war crimes and dirty financial dealings. 

Persecution of John Kiriakou, the CIA officer who blew the whistle on that agency's role in torture programs in 2007.

9/11 was used to justify war on Iraq via lies that Saddam Hussein had something to do with it. Also bombing people in Syria, Yemen, and Somalia. And justification to support Israel's brutalization of Palestinian people in Gaza and the occupied West Bank.  

Source: Brown University, Watson Institute, Costs of War Project

9/11 was used to drive fossil fuel consumption and thus climate crisis.

Source: The Daily Times "Eagleton fifth-graders study 9/11" Sep. 10, 2016 

9/11 was used to produce a lot of canned curriculum that teachers are told they must use to inform kids that are not upset about 9/11. 

Becuase they were not even born when it happened.

And really, how much should they care about 9/11? Their young lives have been upended by a public health disaster, still rampaging out of control in the U.S. 

A disaster -- like 9/11 -- that many argue was at worst planned and at best allowed to happen. How has the Covid-19 disaster been used?

• To ramp up censorship and narrative management dramatically.
• To set groups in the U.S. against each other.
• To enrich the already wealthy.

Sound familiar?

#ViolentAnimals At The Helm Of The Foundering Ship Of State

It is really beyond irony when the White House swears in a torture queen to head up the CIA and simultaneously publishes a press released entitled "What You Need To Know About The Violent Animals Of MS-13."

The dog whistle slur against Latin Americans is tied to the effort by thousands of families to flee U.S.-funded and supported violence in Central America. No doubt MS-13 -- like any profitable drug trafficking gang -- uses violence to control territory, intimidate its opponents, and silence potential critics.

Image: Anthony Freda

By these definitions, the U.S. government qualifies as a profitable drug trafficking gang.

Philosophers among us will argue that "violent animals" is an apt label for humans in general.

As aggressive primates who have allowed testosterone poisoning to infect our entire culture and way of life, humans continue to devise ever more shocking forms of violence against their siblings in the human race. Not to mention the violence routinely visited on other species, our neighbors on this planet.

The rise of hateful language emanating from the demagogue with bad hair and the rest of the kleptocracy is, in some ways, even more alarming than the actual violence. I say this as a history major and long time school civil rights team adviser.

Dehumanizing language always precedes pogroms. Always. It's a bad, bad sign of things to come.


We've heard an outpouring of hate language against a long list of targets during this administration, with many commentators noting that racism in particular has come crawling out of the woodwork where it had been (not very successfully) hiding into the light of day. Among those spattered with hateful epithets: teenagers pleading for gun control after surviving mass shootings at their school; black and brown people going about their business; immigrants who've worked and paid taxes for decades and now face deportation; trans women and men; Muslim-Americans; Palestinians asserting the refugees right of return; refugees in general.

U.S. airstrike on Mosul, Iraq in March, 2017. Photo by Aris Messinis, AFP/Getty. Source: The Intercept

This last group often raises the question: if NATO nations are concerned about the massive influx of refugees destabilizing their countries, how about they stop bombing the places the refugees flee?

Violent animals bomb civilians. Violent animals starve children, and drive the life expectancy of their parents down because they can't afford the oxymoronic for-profit health care. Violent animals exploit vulnerable populations who lack the resources to defend themselves.

In these degraded times, many political commentators indulge in name calling and personal insults on social media. One reason I won't share posts calling someone an idiot, or monster, piece of shit, etc. is that I'm loathe to support hate language. I can harshly criticize someone's actions without dehumanizing them.

Within every human, no matter how depraved in thought or deed, there is a spark of the divine.

Or, put another way, no one is excluded from being loved and valued by the goddess. Every sinner is capable of redemption.

Even those most violent of animals, the human beings.

Getting It Wrong In Afghanistan: Bagram Air Base And Prison Complex

After 16 years of bloody occupation, the kleptocracy is poised to make even more money in Afghanistan. The demagogue with bad hair is listening to an inner circle that includes Erik Prince of the notorious Blackwater mercenary firm that helped occupy Iraq. Privatize even more of the war, they whisper. Endless war means endless profits!

The fact that Afghanistan's sovereignty is vigorously defended by freedom fighters posing as religious fanatics is super convenient.

During the Soviet occupation a fierce young man in Kabul told me, "As long as there is one Afghan left alive, the Soviets will never rule our country!" 

Fast forward to 2017.

Bagram Air Base and Prison Complex, constructed on the ruins of a Soviet base, is the largest U.S. military base in Afghanistan. A suicide bomber inside the gates killed numerous troops gathered to observe Veterans Day there (formerly Armistice Day) last November. It was again targeted this month by a motorcyle-riding suicide bomber who detonated at a security gate. In June, eight Afghan guards headed for the night shift at Bagram were killed when their car was attacked in a driveby shooting.



Back in 2002, prisoners were tortured and beaten to death in the "detention" facility there; a few soldiers were court martialed for their role in the abuse. In 2010 the Pentagon released the names of 645 souls being held prisoner at Bagram. For seven years the detainees included Pakistani neuroscientist Dr. Aafia Siddiqui and her three children.

Building big, expensive compounds where military personnel can enjoy air conditioning, fast food burgers and wifi is what the U.S. is good at. Winning hearts and minds, not so much.

The latest suicide bombing was said to be connected with a public relations faux pas on the part of the occupation. As reported by the Associated Press:

Earlier Wednesday, a U.S. commander had apologized for dropping leaflets in Afghanistan that were deemed offensive to Islam. 

The leaflets dropped Monday night, which encouraged Afghans to cooperate with security forces, included an image of a dog carrying the Taliban flag, said Shah Wali Shahid, the deputy governor of Parwan province, north of Kabul. The flag has Islamic verses inscribed on it, and dogs are seen as unclean in much of the Muslim world.

There have even been allegations that dogs were used to rape prisoners held at Bagram.

An Afghan interpreter interviewed by Emran Feroz for Alternet stated: "Guantanamo is a paradise if you compare it with Bagram."

How much has it cost U.S. taxpayers to create and maintain the cruelest military installation on Earth?

By Staff Sgt. Craig Seals - http://www.bagram.afcent.af.mil/photos

Due to the lack of accountability in Pentagon budgets and contracting practices, the price tag is impossible to determine with any certainty. Chronicles of waste and corruption abound, but accurately quantifying this mammoth corporate welfare scheme will probably not be possible.

Of the 800+ military bases that U.S. taxpayers support abroad, Bagram is at the top of my list to just close already. The U.S. and or NATO will never "win" the war in Afghanistan. Bagram has been called a "factory for terrorism" and even without the torture its mere presence is enough to help Taleban recruiters find the next generation of suicide bombers. 


Just bring the homesick troops back already, and close the base. Erik Prince is already rich enough.

Warped "News" And Legalized Propaganda For U.S. In 2015

Source: Gawker.com "The CIA Must Tell The Truth About My Rendition At 12 Years Old" by Khadija al-Saadi

When I blogged yesterday about how and why people in the U.S. seem to approve of the torture done in their name and with their tax support, I can't believe I forgot to include a link to this great piece by Glenn Greenwald: "U.S. TV Provides Ample Platform For American Torturers, But None For Their Victims" [emphasis mine].

Greenwald explains the information management that leads U.S. consumers into fear and ignorance and keeps them there. The non-white Other who is deemed deserving of torture is almost never heard from in corporate media. Only those who ordered or defend the torture are given a voice.

Gul Rahman froze to death in a CIA prison. Photograph: AP
Source: The Guardian "Rectal rehydration and waterboarding: the CIA torture report's grisliest findings"

There is a danger to the manufactured consent for torture in hearing from victims. A victim might reveal, like Maher Arar, that he was found innocent after all those months of torture. Or that she might reveal, like Khadija al-Saadi, that she was rendered by the CIA as a child and used, along with her younger siblings, to pressure her dissident father as he was tortured in Libya. 

I started my day with this bracing overview of the ways in which the U.S. public has been misled about another international crisis, the one in Ukraine -- where we are backing neo-Nazi militias in a power struggle on Russia's border. Patrick Smith writing in Slate focuses on the New York Times disinformation campaign which has falsely portrayed Russia's Putin as the aggressor. The NYT has now done an about face and admits that NATO was the aggressor all along. Acting as so-called "media clerks" to the U.S. State Department, those parrots for the Pentagon, apparently does not result in accurate news reporting. Big surprise!

There's a lengthy delay in most truth leaking out to the public, and that delay is undoubtedly deliberate. By the time some real facts emerge the news cycle has exhausted that topic and is on to the next. That the U.S. tortures people to death is a documented fact! Yawn, says the U.S. public.

The only current "news" that interests most is who won the game last night, and which celebrity is in the hall of shame.

I am extremely thankful to still have the Internet and a robust network of information streaming my way via activist friends who spend a lot more time reading than I can. Of course my news is filtered like anyone else's, and there is a Twilight Zone effect created by the gap of months or even years between what I learn from my news providers and when this information finally emerges in corporate media.

In my idealistic youth I wanted to be a journalist. This feeling stirs again sometimes when I see real journalists at work, as in the film citizenfour which depicts in real time the struggle for Edward Snowden to bring his truth to light with the help of journalists.

He actually respects the journalists' craft, and does not mistake his own expertise in accessing and evaluating the significance of information with effectively disseminating it to the public. (It's good that Snowden recognized his own strengths and weaknesses. Cloak and dagger spying is not a strong suit; it would be hard to find a more feeble attempt at disguise, for example, as he prepares to exit the hotel in Hong Kong where he has been hiding.)

Another nugget of information that slipped the news cycle: an amendment in the NDAA bill for FY13 that nullified the Smith-Mundt Act of 1948 and the Foreign Relations Act of  1987. This effectively legalized propaganda for consumption by the U.S. public. (In addition to the $2 billion spent annually to convince youngsters that the military is a good career choice, that is.) Taxpayer supported, of course. 

Are U.S. consumers really willing to pay their own government to lie to them? Probably not, but only if they know about it.

Do U.S. People Approve Of Torture Because Victims Are Non-White Or Non-Christian?

Burial of the dead at the battle of Wounded Knee, S.D. U.S. Soldiers putting Indians in common grave; some corpses are frozen in different positions. South Dakota. c1891 Jan. 17. Northwestern Photo Co. (Trager & Kuhn) Chadron, Neb. (Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division) 

The most shocking and dispiriting news of 2014 was not the release of several hundred pages of executive summary of the Senate Intelligence Committee's investigation of CIA torture programs. It is indeed horrible but I already knew about most of it -- even if my senators wanted to pretend that they did not.

The worst news was also not the release late on Christmas Eve of the NSA's redacted internal investigation findings of gross misconduct by the surveillance apparatus we fund as part of the Pentagon's annual 50+ percent share of the federal budget. (Thanks, ACLU, for filing a Freedom of Information Act request so we could see at least some of this.)

I have read enough history of empires -- Elizabethan, Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman spring to mind -- to know that spying is seldom subject to meaningful oversight and is often used for personal gain or retribution. Humans are frail creatures, suspicious and jealous, and if they think their spouse is cheating on them or they feel wronged by someone at work, it doesn't surprise me that they might begin searching another person's personal communications or private data.

Most people think ethics and laws are situational anyway. If a person is guilty of wrongdoing, that person has lost some of their rights. Right? Because if you're not doing anything wrong, why should you care that someone in the Pentagon -- or, more likely, working for a private contractor -- can read your emails or listen in on your phone calls. Right?

This kind of thinking quickly crosses the line into the murky zone where the "wrong kind" of people have fewer rights than others.

This brings me to the most alarming and discouraging news of 2014: that most people surveyed in the U.S. approve of torture.

Ok, they have been subjected to hundreds of hours of propaganda selling them on the false notion that torture produces useful information.

But the real bottom line is that they do not expect their child or other family member to be subjected to torture. Why this naïve expectation? Because most Americans are white, and most Americans are not Muslim.

An illuminating documentary that examines how early and comprehensive is the campaign to demonize this Other that could be deserving of torture in the right circumstances is Reel Bad Arabs: How Hollywood Vilifies a People. Young people I watch this film with tend to be most horrified by the role of beloved Disney films in subtly creating racism.

As for the anti-Muslim bias it is well to remember that Islam is practiced by people of all sorts of colors and physical appearance, but that outward signs like a woman in a headscarf

(no, not this kind of headscarf)

(this kind of headscarf)

draw plenty of prejudice and hostile behavior.


Most respondents to a poll on torture have their minds made up and are not open to being confused by facts. 

Such as the twenty key findings in the Senate's report:

(Katie Park and Laris Karklis/Committee Study of the Central Intelligence Agency's Detention and Interrogation Program.)  Source: Washington Post

Perhaps the long tradition of violence against Native Americans lays the groundwork for approving of torture. Jamelle Bouie writing for Slate provided context in his post "Of course Americans are OK with torture. Look at how we treat our prisoners." People in the U.S. who aren't white are vastly more likely to be arrested, convicted, and sentenced to long prison terms that often include the casual use of torture methods like prolonged solitary confinement.

So that's my most discouraging news of 2014. 

The most encouraging? The multiple, vigorous and unstoppable uprisings for racial justice all over this wounded nation. Leadership from quite young people, especially girls, and of people color and their allies -- many of them athletes -- has been amazing. I look forward to listening to them and working as an ally in 2015.

Los Angeles activists shut down a freeway after the release of the autopsy report on yet another unarmed black man shot by police. Victim Ezell Ford was known to suffer from mental illness.

Lewiston, Maine Friday, Dec. 12, 2014 Walk For Justice, Walk For Peace #BlackLivesMatter

Mendocino High School Girls Varsity players:(Front row, left to right): Aimee Gordon, Naomi Baker, Sunny Scott. (Back row) Isobell Hall and Michaela Hubbard. [Photo from Mendocinosportsplus.] 

Guantánamo Torture Exhibited At National Museum of American History #GTMO12

Saturday, January 11, 2014

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
PRESS CONTACTS:
Jeremy Varon, 732-979-3119, jvaron@aol.comFrida Berrigan, 860-389-8566, frida.berrigan@gmail.com

Vowing to “Make Guantánamo History,” human rights advocates from around the country marked the beginning of the thirteenth year of torture and indefinite detention at the prison camp with a dramatic protest at the National Museum of American History. 150 activists occupied the atrium of the crowded museum for more than two hours, speaking out against torture and calling for Guantanamo to close.

The activists hung banners, stood in stress positions in hoods and jumpsuits, spoke to the tourists, and with their bodies and voices revised the museum’s “Price of Freedom” exhibit to include twelve years of torture and indefinite detention as the bitter cost of the United States’ misguided pursuit of “national security.”

In a booming chorus, members of Witness Against Torture and other groups read from a statement that closed with the lines: “to honor freedom and justice and the struggles of Americans for these things, we must end torture, close the prison and make Guantánamo history.”

Chantal deAlcuaz, a Witness Against Torture activist from Anchorage, Alaska spent the two hours in an orange jumpsuit and black hood. She reflected that: “We came here today because we want to see Guantánamo relegated to a museum — to be shuttered and condemned, but also understood as an example of where fear, hatred and violence can take us.”

The museum protest followed a robust and spirited rally at the White House that featured speeches from grassroots activists, Guantánamo attorneys and representatives of national human rights organizations.

“It was so great to see the spirit of hope at the White House, in the streets of DC and at the museum,” said Chris Knestrick, a divinity student form Chicago. “We definitely moved closer to our goal of closing Guantanamo today. And the work will continue!!”

Since Monday, January 6, Witness Against Torture activists from throughout the country have gathered in Washington, D.C. to engage in street theater, demonstrations, fasting and direct action to demand that Guantánamo be closed immediately.  There were also anti-Guantánamo protests and vigils throughout the country, including in Los Angeles, CA, Boston MA, Chicago IL, Santa Monica, CA Erie, PA, and Cleveland, OH.

Protest in front of the White House before proceeding to the museum Jan. 11, 2014

Witness Against Torture is a grassroots movement that came into being in December 2005 when 24 activists walked to Guantanamo to visit the prisoners and condemn torture policies. Since then, it has engaged in public education, community outreach, and non-violent direct action. January 2014 is the eighth year the group has gathered annually in Washington, DC to call for justice and accountability. To learn more, visit www.witnesstorture.org
##

From CODEPINK's press release about the White House protests prior to the museum action:

Co-Sponsors of the event: Center for Constitutional Rights, Amnesty International, Witness Against Torture, Codepink: Women for Peace, National Religious Campaign Against Torture, September Eleventh Families for Peaceful Tomorrows, Council on American-Islamic Relations,  Bill of Rights Defense Committee, Project Salam: Support and Legal Advocacy for Muslims, Reprieve, Torture Abolition and Survivors Support Coalition, World Can't Wait, Defending Dissent Foundation, The Blue Lantern Project, CloseGuantánamo.org, Columban Center for Advocacy and Outreach, Maryknoll Office for Global Concerns, Interfaith Action for Human Rights.

Photos of protest march at the headquarters of the U.S. military's Southern Command in Miami, FL.