This Saturday, Boalt Hall (where John Yoo teaches) will graduate the Class of 2013.
Attorney General ERIC HOLDER will be there to speak.
So will the Guantánamo prisoners (on Hunger Strike Day 94) …
As the Guantánamo prisoners’ hunger strike approaches 100 days, their message – their agony – calls out to every person in America. The torture program that John Yoo helped to set up is still operational today. To say NO to that, the prisoners remaining at Guantánamo have put their lives on the line.
When your government is committing great crimes, people of conscience bear the responsibility to stand up, speak out, and call out criminals and enablers alike.
What can we do? Friends, we can refuse to tolerate in silence the ongoing “living hell” of the prison at Guantánamo. We can refuse to tolerate hideous torture — and all the related Bush-to-Obama sliding scale related crimes that go with it, from rendition to targeted assassination “kill lists” and drone warfare. We can refuse to accept endless excuses including Obama’s latest remarks about “wanting” to close Guantanamo. But we must make our refusal massive, and make it heard, seen, and felt.
You can sign and support the 100 Day message about to be published in The New York Times.
And if you are in the Bay Area or nearby — you can join this next (very public, newsworthy) protest denouncing torture and torturers on Saturday.
PROTEST! Saturday May 11
8:30 to 10:30 AM
Outside the UC Berkeley Law Commencement
Hearst Greek Theatre
UC Berkeley campus
Eric Holder is this Saturday’s commencement speaker. What a slap in the face to any law student, law professor, law professional or scholar, or any other person of sound mind, who thinks law and due process matter!!!! Readers of this list are very up on Holder’s track record as a henchman for the Obama Doctrine that enshrines and expands all the criminally illegal practices Obama “inherited” from Bush-Cheney. Holder is about kill lists, drones, and rendition (disappearing) and torture.
Be at the Greek Theater Saturday morning. Hold a sign, or a photo of a Guantánamo prisoner, or hand out information, and orange “No Torture: ribbons. Do not let UC and Boalt Hall say torture is OK. Do not let John Yoo (a professor and political advocate of torture) or Eric Holder (an attorney general who defends torture and other crimes) stand unchallenged as role models for the next generation of lawyers and judges.
This Saturday, raise your voice especially for the hunger striking prisoners at Guantánamo, now in their fourth month of a courageous and desperate fight to be seen and heard by the world. Confront the UC leadership — from the Chancellor and Regents on down to the dean of the law school — that FOR TEN YEARS has harbored an architect of torture on its faculty, as if it’s OK that future lawyers and judges is being taught that war criminals are respected, accepted — and highly paid — in academia.
This is a nonviolent mass protest action initiated by World Can’t Wait, and open to ALL people of conscience. We are not protesting against the students whose graduation is a meaningful day – we are protesting the fact that their university has given them a known war criminal as a role model and mentor. And we call on the students, alumni, faculty members, and the entire UC community to refuse to accept torturers as teachers – to refuse the complicity of silence.
The world can’t wait – Close Guantánamo Now.