Blast from the Past: “Reckoning with Torture,” Video of Andy Worthington, Mimi Kennedy, Ray McGovern and Others in Berkeley in 2010

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I’ve recently been going through my (nearly) ten-year archive of articles about Guantánamo and related issues, in an effort to work out what to include in a forthcoming book compiling the best of my writing about Guantánamo. One of the duller aspects of this work has been to fix broken links, in particular to radio shows and videos of TV appearances and other live events, but along the way I was reminded of a exhilarating, if rather exhausting trip that I made to Berkeley in October 2010 — my first ever visit to the West Coast of the US — for Berkeley Says No To Torture Week.

The week of events was put together by the World Can’t Wait, the National Lawyers Guild (San Francisco), Progressive Democrats of America, Meiklejohn Civil Liberties Institute, National Accountability Action Network, Code Pink, FireJohnYoo.org, Berkeley Fellowship of Unitarian Universalists Social Justice Committee and the Rev. Kurt Kuhwald, and Berkeley was chosen as the venue because John Yoo, the author of the Bush administration’s notorious “torture memos,” is law professor at Berkeley, even though, under George W. Bush, when he was a lawyer in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, which is supposed to provide the executive branch with impartial legal advice, he attempted to redefine torture so that the CIA could use it on “high-value detainees” in the “war on terror.”

Berkeley City Council had adopted a Resolution to hold a week of public educational events to educate the community about torture in September 2010, and Debra Sweet of the World Can’t Wait then arranged my visit, which involved me taking part in what I remember as several events a day during that week, culminating in a performance of “Reckoning With Torture,” which I’m cross-posting below, via YouTube:

“Reckoning With Torture” involves readings of official documents that reveal the scope of America’s post-9/11 torture program. The ACLU and PEN American Center staged the first “Reckoning With Torture” at The Cooper Union in New York  in September 2009, and in March 2010 a second performance was staged in Washington, D.C., and more recent details of performances can be found on a dedicated website here.

In Berkeley, on October 15, 2010, those taking part in the performance included myself, retired CIA officer and peace activist Ray McGovern, the actress, author and activist Mimi Kennedy, Pamela Merchant of the Center for Justice & Accountability, Marjorie Cohn of the National Lawyers Guild, Renee Saucedo of La Raza Centro Legal, the journalist Jason Leopold, Peter Selz of Berkeley Art Museum, activist and musician Shahid Buttar, the psychologist and activist Jeffrey Kaye, Devorah Major, the poet laureate of San Francisco, and Col. Ann Wright, peace activist and former US State Department official.

I hope you enjoy this blast from the past.

Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer, film-maker and singer-songwriter (the lead singer and main songwriter for the London-based band The Four Fathers, whose debut album ‘Love and War’ and EP ‘Fighting Injustice’ are available here to download or on CD via Bandcamp). He is the co-founder of the Close Guantánamo campaign (and the Countdown to Close Guantánamo initiative, launched in January 2016), the co-director of We Stand With Shaker, which called for the release from Guantánamo of Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in the prison (finally freed on October 30, 2015), and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by the University of Chicago Press in the US, and available from Amazon, including a Kindle edition — click on the following for the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (available on DVD here — or here for the US).

To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to Andy’s RSS feed — and he can also be found on Facebook (and here), Twitter, Flickr and YouTube. Also see the six-part definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, and The Complete Guantánamo Files, an ongoing, 70-part, million-word series drawing on files released by WikiLeaks in April 2011. Also see the definitive Guantánamo habeas list, the full military commissions list, and the chronological list of all Andy’s articles.

Please also consider joining the Close Guantánamo campaign, and, if you appreciate Andy’s work, feel free to make a donation.