October 30: 200 Students Witness Waterboarding Demonstration at Diablo Valley College, CA
By a student at Diablo Valley College
On October 30, 2008 World Cant Wait and Contra Costa Radical Action organized a waterboarding demonstration and Diablo Valley College in Pleasant Hill, CA, (a community college in conservative suburban Contra Costa County, east of San Francisco). This action was organized to bring awareness and hopefully motivate the students to take some kind of action against the torture and war that is going in their names. The college has a very diverse group of students and the quad area is usually congested with people standing around in groups discussing the latest trends.
About an hour before the demonstration a couple of us walked around the campus informing and inviting the students to the demonstration. We asked them if they had heard about waterboarding and if the had any opinions on it. Most had never heard of waterboarding but were interested and wanted to check out the demonstration.
We set up in the middle of the quad on a stage with large signs that read “NO TORTURE” and a bench for the waterboarding. As I walked through the crowds inviting more students to come watch I noticed that a lot of students were noticing the signs and became interested in what was going on. We ended up growing a large crowd of about 150-200 students.
We began with a speaker getting on the stage and speaking about the
torture happening all over the world by our government in our names and
calling on people to decide for themselves what they think about it.
Then three men (two dressed in military uniforms and one as a CIA
agent) grabbed someone out of the crowd who was who acting as an
unsuspecting person. He kicked and screamed. They dragged him to the
bench shouting at him as he screamed and questioned, “what’s going on!”
and “what did I do?”
The soldiers hit and yelled at him as they shouted a barrage of
questions (about dates, times and peoples names) as he repeated that he
was only a journalism student with no ties to terrorists. Then the
soldiers forced him onto a bench, covered his mouth with a towel and
began to pour water over his face, simulating a waterboarding. During
this demonstration some students laughed as if it were a joke, while
others took it very serious, even looking at those who were laughing in
disgust.
Once it was over the speaker asked the crowd if they thought it was
torture and many people screamed out “YES!” While a few others thought
it was funny and screamed out “NO!” Then many people in the crowd
broke out into different discussions and debates about torture and the
wars in the Middle East. These types of political discussions are rare,
especially at this scale, on this campus.
There were some heated disagreements with those who support the
military or these wars and those who don’t. An Iranian woman, who
stated that she had grown up in war and still had nightmares about it
pleaded with a young man who had signed up for the military to get out.
She stated how important these issues of war were to her that even
though she had an important class to attend, she would rather stay out
in the quad and continue these discussions.
I think that even though everyone did not agree with each other it was
a very effective action. It got a lot of people who don’t usually or
even ever consider or know about these issues to begin discussing
them. We plan to follow up with the students we met out there today
and continue to fight against war and torture, no matter who becomes
the next president. Hopefully some of those who were horrified by the
waterboarding that they saw and motivated to act, can also be part of
the movement to fire torture professor John Yoo at UC Berkeley.