Emergency Campaign to Free Iran's Political Prisoners
Debra Sweet | July 7, 2021
Ariel Dorfman: We should not let the prisoners down
Publish Emergency Appeal in NY Review of Books
You are needed to help raise $15,000 by July 16
June 6: We’ve raised $1,200 and received a generous match from a signer of the Emergency Appeal. It will double your contributions up to $1,000 and bring us to $3,200! Donate Now!
A brutal campaign of arrests, torture and executions is taking place in Iran. The lives and dignity of hundreds of political prisoners are in imminent, mortal danger. This emergency has only intensified with the election of Ebrahim Raisi.
We must rally to their defense and raise $15,000 by July 16 to publish a full-page color ad of our Emergency Appeal -- The Lives of Iran’s Political Prisoners Hang in the Balance—We Must ACT Now -- on the back cover of the August edition of the prestigious New York Review of Books (NYRB) and advertise our campaign in their online editions.
Death of a war criminal, but not of the war
Debra Sweet | July 1, 2021
Donald Rumsfeld was a cunning unapologetic political/military operative in the US government's global machine of aggressive war-making. His death is no loss to humanity.
But it should cause an evaluation of the role he and his partners in war crimes - members of the Bush regime - played in launching the on-going war of terror on people in the Persian Gulf, Afghanistan/Pakistan and beyond, and of the on-going efforts to stop these crimes.
A known known
Raymond Nat Turner | 2021
“…there are known knowns. There are things
we know that we know. There are known
unknowns—things we do not know we know…”
—an infamous War Criminal
Biden’s Slow Progress on Closing Guantánamo
Andy Worthington | June 17, 2021
An article last week by NBC News — “Biden quietly moves to start closing Guantánamo ahead of 20th anniversary of 9/11” — was widely shared by opponents of the continued existence of the shameful prison at Guantánamo Bay, but frustratingly failed to live up to the promise of its headline.
40 men are still held at Guantánamo, and nine of these men have been approved for release by high-level US government review processes — three in 2010, two in 2016, one in 2020, and three just last month, in decisions taken by the Periodic Review Boards set up under President Obama that show a willingness on the part of the Biden administration to recognize that there is something fundamentally wrong with a system that continues to hold, indefinitely, men who have been held for up to 19 years, and have never been charged with a crime.
June 13: Iranian political prisoners face sham trial - Regime repression sparks global movement for prisoners' freedom
Larry Everest | June 11, 2021
"June 13 is going to be a make-or-break day for my mother, Nahid Taghavi, and other Iranian political prisoners," says Mariam Claren.
"These prisoners—who never should have been arrested in the first place—will be brought before an Iranian court and could face harsh sentencing for the 'crime' of speaking out for basic rights and against injustice," Claren writes in a June 9 oped in Ms. Magazine.
The other political prisoners reportedly being brought to court include Mehran Raouf, Bahareh Soleimani, Nazanin Mohammadnejad, Elham Samimi, and Somayeh Kargar, who is Kurdish.
These and many other Iranians, from women's and human rights activists, to protesters, dissidents and revolutionaries, to members of religious and oppressed minorities, have been targeted by a wave of violent repression and arbitrary arrests. This has been the Islamic Republic's response to the just mass uprisings that rocked Iran in November 2019, and the heroic, ongoing resistance of prisoners and ordinary Iranians.
The outrage that won't go away
Justice-loving people were happy when Obama ordered Guantanamo closed; some were incredulous that he never took the actions he could have to actually close it. Trump, a proponent of torture, and particularly a fan of water-boarding, wanted to expand the US torture camp, and promised to reduce any protections to those held without charge.
Now comes Biden who seems to think Guantanamo is an embarrassment, and has indicated he would like to close it. But he has done even less than Obama did to take the steps needed.
We're sharing here an upcoming World Can't Wait event (please help spread the word to Spanish language speakers) and some recent articles of interest on Guantanamo.
Saturday May 22nd en español - On-line Event: Screening of "The Mauritanian"
with special guest Mohamedou Ould Slahi
7:30 pm EDT / 6:30pm EST (Mexico/Central America) - stay tuned for details on the stream
Is US Ending the "good" War in Afghanistan?
Debra Sweet | April 23, 2021 The political and military leaders who run the U.S. have real problems in the Middle East. Twenty years of their "war on terror" has failed to establish U.S. control over the region and only spread and strengthened Islamic fundamentalism. Just one of their justifications for attacking Afghanistan - to exact revenge for 9/11- was true, though completely unjustified. The others, to establish "democracy," to "save the women," to end "terrorism," were always designed to satisfy those who think "America equals the good guys."
Biden has been forced to conclude that the U.S. can't "win" this war. The U.S. entered in 2001 with almost no translators who spoke local languages, ignorantly killed local forces who were trying to aid the U.S., tortured and killed prisoners at the notorious U.S. airbase in Bagram and killed hundreds of civilians in night raids and with drones. “We were devoid of a fundamental understanding of Afghanistan — we didn’t know what we were doing,” Douglas Lute, a three-star Army general who served as the White House’s Afghan war czar during the Bush and Obama administrations, told government interviewers in 2015. He added: “What are we trying to do here? We didn’t have the foggiest notion of what we were undertaking...” This aggressive, imperialist war has been a disaster for the people of Afghanistan. For one example, women in Afghanistan still have one of the highest maternal death rates on the globe.
Call for a Global Ban on Weaponized Drones
Announcing BanKillerDrones, an international grassroots campaign working to ban aerial weaponized drones and military and police drone surveillance. Our friend Nick Mottern of KnowDrones.com and other activists decry the spread of drone war atrocities since modern day drone warfare was started in 2001 by the United States, with the extent of human loss and suffering held in secret by the perpetrators, and call for a global ban.
This is the endorsement of the ban from Debra Sweet:
When George W. Bush, then Commander in Chief of the year-old U.S. "war on terror," authorized a Predator drone strike on a car in Yemen in November 2002, the act was shocking and the details hazy for years. The CIA, which ran the operation, the first known targeted killing by Hellfire missile from an armed drone, says the six men killed were "suspected" al-Qaeda members.
Daniel Hale
Debra Sweet | April 14, 2021
We met Daniel Hale in 2013 at the "drone summit," a gathering of activists to stop US drone warfare in Washington DC. He was trained and used by the Air Force in the first years of the secret U.S. drone program, courageously spoke out about it, and was charged with violating the Espionage Act by the Trump Justice Department. Biden's Justice Department was about to try him this month, when he pled guilty to one count of the Act."Unmanned" is a short feature film dealing with the conflicts of a drone pilot...
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US Military Closes Camp 7, Guantánamo’s “High-Value Detainee” Prison Block, Moves Men to Camp 5
In news from Guantánamo, the US military announced yesterday that it had shut Camp 7, the secretive prison block where Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and other so-called “high-value detainees” have been held since their arrival at Guantánamo from CIA “black sites” in September 2006, and had moved the prisoners to Camp 5.
Modeled on a maximum security prison in Terre Haute, Indiana, Camp 5, which cost $17.5 million, opened in 2004, and its solid-walled, isolated cells were used to hold prisoners regarded as non-compliant. As the prison’s population shrank, however, it was closed — in September 2016 — and its remaining prisoners transferred to Camp 6, which opened in 2006, and includes a communal area.
Camp 7, meanwhile, which cost $17 million, was also built in 2004. Two storeys tall, it was modeled on a maximum-security prison in Bunker Hill, Indiana, and, as Carol Rosenberg explained in the New York Times yesterday, had “a modest detainee health clinic and a psychiatric ward with a padded cell, but none of the hospice or end-of-life care capacity once envisioned by Pentagon planners.”
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