WarCriminalsWatch Events

A World Can't Event Launching the Close Guantanamo NOW Tour 2014

Thursday January 9, 2014
Reception: 6:30 pm
Film begins: 7:00 pm

Sreening of Doctors of the Darkside - 74 minutes long.
All Souls Church, 1157 Lexington Avenue @ 80 Street, Manhattan

Co-sponsored by Peace and Justice Task Force of All Souls Unitarian Church,New York Campaign Against Torture, No More Guantanamos, Psychologists for Social Responsibility, Resistance Cinema, Revolution Books, Witness Against Torture and World Can't Wait.
With Andy Worthington, Debra Sweet, Todd Pierce - former US military defense attorney for Guantanamo prisoners, Martha Davis - director of Doctors of the Darkside, and Leili Kashani - Center for Constitutional Rights.

The Bush regime filled the off-shore prison at Guantanamo Bay by rendering men seized from around the globe into indefinite captivity, employing and legally justifying a program of torture they called "enhanced interrogation." They slowly began to release prisoners for whom no case could be fabricated to justify prison, while planning to keep many forever, most of whom could not be shown to have played any role in opposing the United States.

When Barack Obama was elected, he quickly promised to close it within a year... five years ago. The illegal prison is still open, with new infrastructure added and more personnel than ever. Most people in the US have no idea there are still 82 prisoners there who were cleared for release years ago; 45 of whom the President says will never be charged or released; and 30 to be put through "military commissions" trials which are designed to cover the torture inflicted on the prisoners, depriving of them rights the U.S. has claimed to cherish.

Why, as Obama says the "war on terror" is winding down, will this country not close Guantanamo? And what is our responsibility to see that it does?

Andy Worthington @guantanamoandy - a journalist based in the UK, has covered the prison intensely since 2006. In hundreds of articles, he's uncovered the lives of the men held without charge, and the stories the US created about them. Author of The Guantanamo Files: Stories of the 774 Men Held in Guantanamo and director of the 2009 film Outside the Law, he further developed the picture by sifting through the Guantanamo Detainee Briefs released via Wikileaks by Private Manning in 2011.

Debra Sweet @DSweetWCW- is the Director of The World Can't Wait, leader of years of protest of indefinite detention and torture by the United States, including a full-page ad in The New York Times in May 2013 picturing Guantanamo prisoners for the first time in those pages, and bringing together prisoners' attorneys, academics, artists, and voices of conscience to declare "Close Guantanamo NOW."