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11-23-13 Stanford Says NO To War: The Bigger Picture Emerges @ The Big Game |
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Kudos to the students of Stanford Says No To War, for insisting on the utter relevance of torture and war crimes to today’s Big Game festivities (the annual Stanford/UC Berkeley football confrontation)! Their flyer used football lingo and some irony to offer damning exposure of Stanford professor Condoleezza Rice’s role in war crimes (torture program, illegal invasion of Iraq, etc.) And the flyer riffed on the latest news of Rice’s appointment to the NCAA playoff selection committee, and the students are right: this is bizarre on top of outrageous. Now a college football connection will give this war criminal a more wholesome veneer, a deeper cultural claim to legitimacy -- as if she’s no longer a torturer and a mass murderer, just a good old all-American sports lover??
Here’s the torture tableau outside the Stanford Stadium gate, set up by Stanford Says No to War and World Can’t Wait. (The visiting team got equal time: we were also agitating about Berkeley ’s own war criminal, John Yoo.) The Abu Ghraib figure wearing the “Cal” logo stood motionless next to his Stanford twin on a big sign. We flyered and talked over a bullhorn around them, as the fans crowded through.
A lot of people looked, listened – some gave us thumbs up and nods, some cursed us, many cell phones were snapping pictures. Some students asked us who is Rice – they had no idea. Others knew she was part of Bush’s regime and that “something about torture” went on at Guantánamo, yet didn’t realize that Guantánamo isn’t ancient history; it’s still open. Some yelled, “Hooray for Condi” (and we’d call back: is that a “Hooray” for war and torture?).
More than a few older people (alums, parents) thanked us for bringing our message today.
Here’s an alum (of BOTH Stanford and UC Berkeley Law!) who stopped, listened, then asked for a turn on the bullhorn. He added his own voice to ours denouncing the un-accountability of the war criminals now at loose (and on the campuses) today.
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