Please support my work! I’m currently trying to raise $2500 (£2000) to support my writing and campaigning on Guantánamo and related issues over the next three months of the Trump administration.

Yesterday (June 28), three members of Veterans for Peace — the US military veterans’ organization founded in 1985 and committed to building “a culture of peace” — interrupted the Senate confirmation hearing for Steven G. Bradbury, nominated by Donald Trump as general counsel for the Commerce, Science and Transportation Department, and were subsequently arrested. Videos are available here and here,

The three VFP members — Tarak Kauff, Ken Ashe and Ellen Barfield — were protesting about Bradbury’s role as one of the authors of the notorious “torture memos” under George W. Bush, and they were not alone. As the New York Times explained, Sen. Tammy Duckworth, a Democrat from Illinois, told Bradbury at the hearing, “You lacked the judgment to stand up and say what is morally right when pressured by the president of the United States, and I’m afraid you would do so again.” She then “wagged her finger at Mr. Bradbury and accused him of having a dangerous ‘rubber stamp’ mentality,” and said, “I cannot oppose this nomination strongly enough.”

For my call for Steven Bradbury to be prosecuted — along with other senior Bush administration officials and lawyers — listen to my song ‘81 Million Dollars,’ performed with my band The Four Fathers.

The “torture memos” were written and approved in the Office of Legal Counsel (the branch of the Justice Department that is supposed to provide impartial advice to the executive branch), and the first examples were written by law professor John Yoo, and approved by Yoo’s boss, Jay S. Bybee. The memos sought to redefine torture so that it could be used by the CIA on Abu Zubaydah, seized in Pakistan in March 2002 and regarded as a “high-value detainee,” and approved a list of techniques that included waterboarding, an ancient torture technique that involves controlled drowning. Read the rest of this entry »

On Thursday August 1, I’ll be taking part, via teleconferencing, in “The Grotesque Injustice of Guantánamo: An Insiders’ Account,” an event in Portland, Oregon organized by peace activist and Vietnam veteran S. Brian Willson and Laura Sandow, a US Navy veteran, who was serving at Guantánamo when George W. Bush’s “war on terror” prison opened in January 2002.

Brian was the commander of a security unit in Vietnam, and is a trained lawyer and criminologist. He recently participated in a hunger strike in Portland in solidarity with the Guantánamo hunger strikers, and is the author of Blood On The Tracks: The Life and Times of S. Brian Willson (PM Press, 2011).

Laura first asked me to be involved back in June, when she and Brian had decided to put an event together, and her request coincided with the publication of her story in the online comic magazine Symbolia, in a powerful strip written by the journalist Sarah Mirk, based on an interview with Laura, and drawn by Lucy Bellwood. See this Think Progress article for excerpts from Laura’s story. As she explained to me in a recent email, “The more people that understand this atrocity [the prison at Guantánamo Bay], the more likely we are to prevent it from becoming an acceptable course of action for future policy decisions.”

The event is sponsored by Veterans for Peace Chapter 72, and takes place in the Buchan Room at the First Unitarian Church, 1226 SW Salmon Street, Portland, Oregon 97205, beginning at 7pm. Doors open at 6:30 pm, and there is a suggested sliding-scale donation of $5 to $20 for the event, although the organizers stress that no one will be turned away for lack of funds. Read the rest of this entry »