Christian Peace Witness for Iraq

Ken Butigan — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 11:31:22 -0500

Christian Peace Witness for Iraq

Sets Plan for The Next Year

Twenty-six Christian Peace Witness for Iraq organizers from eleven denominations and a number of other organizations – including Pace e Bene -- met June 13-14 at Montreat Conference Center outside Asheville, North Carolina to assess its recent work and to plan for the next year.

The assembly set in motion a range of projects designed to strengthen the faith community’s call for an end to the US war in Iraq during this election year; to foster a comprehensive theology of peace; to support reconstruction and reparations; to continue its collaboration with the Olive Branch Interfaith Peace Partnership; and to spark a movement for naming and accounting for the violence that the US government has wreaked on Iraq.

Finally, it decided to organize Christian Peace Witness for Iraq’s third national gathering for prayer and action in Washington, DC in mid-2009.

Pace e Bene has been involved in the work of CPWI since its inception. It helped organize the CPWI events that were held March 2007 and March 2008 in Washington, DC and in communities across the US.

As its next stage begins, we invite members of the Pace e Bene community to join in this initiative. On July 23, a general conference call will be held for all interested in helping to organize this next phase. Please consider joining in!

To RSVP for this conference call, please contact Ken Butigan at kenbutigan@paceebene.org.

Sentencing statement

Ken Butigan — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 13:39:43 -0500

On January 11, 2008, eighty-two people were arrested at the US Supreme Court calling for the closure of Guantanamo Bay Prison and an end to torture as policy and practice.

Thirty-four people were tried in Superior Court in Washington, DC the week of May 27. They were found guilty by Judge Wendell Gardner. As Witness Against Torture -- the organizing group -- reported, "The 34 defendants represented themselves, mounting a spirited defense of their First Amendment rights to protest the gross injustice of abuse and indefinite detention of men at the U.S. Naval Base at Guantanamo Bay. Twelve were given jail sentences ranging from one to fifteen days, as well as a one year stay-away from the Supreme Court, and $50 in court fees."

"Witness Against Torture" Trial Diary: Entry 6

Ken Butigan — Sun, 01 Jun 2008 09:34:23 -0500

"Witness Against Torture" Defendants Found Guilty

See "Witness Against Torture" website for roundup of news

See May 30, 2008 Washington Post story on guilty verdict

See Professor Michael Foley's Court Testimony

"Witness Against Torture" Trial Diary: Entry 5

Ken Butigan — Thu, 29 May 2008 22:54:13 -0500

Today was the most powerful day I have ever spent in a court of law. Clear and apt statements about Guantanamo Bay Prison -- and our first amendment rights to speak out at a time when torture has become legal as as policy and practice -- were made throughout the day. Toward the afternoon, after three days in court, thirty-four of us were found guilty.

We will be sentenced tomorrow.

Here is the Witness Against Torture press release about today's events:

ANTI-TORTURE ACTIVISTS CONVICTED -- GUANTANAMO PRISON PUT ON TRIAL

"Witness Against Torture" Trial Diary: Entry 4

Ken Butigan — Wed, 28 May 2008 22:56:50 -0500

Witness Against Torture Trial Diary:

Washington, DC

Entry 4

Wednesday, May 28, 2008

By Ken Butigan

After yesterday's skirmishes over pre-trial matters and legal technicalities, the Witness Against Torture trial began to gather momentum today. The government ressted its case -- accelerateds by the defense's decision to relinquish challenges to the prosecution's assertions about identifying defendants -- and Witness Against Torture began to present its vision of why and how we acted on January 11 at the Supreme Court.

"Witness Against Torture" Trial Diary: Entry 3

Ken Butigan — Tue, 27 May 2008 22:17:34 -0500

Witness Against Torture Trial Diary:

Washington, DC

Entry 3:

Tuesday, May 27, 2008

By Ken Butigan

The "Witness Against Torture" Trial began this morning. Before those proceedings started, the troupe gathered at the Supreme Court, donned orange jumpsuits and black hoods, and processed two by two through Washington to the Superior Court, where a press conference is held. Day one of the trial deals with preliminasry matters and the government's case. A fuller report is coming soon.

"Witness Against Torture" Trial Diary: Entry 2

Ken Butigan — Mon, 26 May 2008 22:08:06 -0500

Witness Against Torture Trial Diary:

Washington, DC

Entry 2:

Monday, May 26, 2008

By Ken Butigan

Memorial Day. Thirty-six of us gather in St. Stephen of the Incarnation Church in the Columbia Heights neighborhood of Washington, DC this afternoon to rehearse for our trial that begins tomorrow morning. We are in the capable hands of attorneys Mark Goldstone and Ann Wilcox – who will be advising us, even as we all represent ourselves in Superior Court – and the key trial organizers, including Frida Berrigan and Matt Daloisio.

It was a hard-charging practice session as we moved systematically through each section of the trial. As always, it is a teeter-totter between prophetic vision – what in our heart and soul that moved our body into position – and the technicalities and precision of a legal defense. Most of were guilty at one time or another of blurring the line between these two provinces of experience and meaning.

We finish the day role-playing tomorrow morning's drama that will preceed our court appearance: a procession from the Supreme Court to Superior Court in orange jumpsuits and black hoods. There will be a press conference outside the courthouse.

"Witness Against Torture" Trial Diary: Entry 1

Ken Butigan — Sun, 25 May 2008 13:41:59 -0500

A Pilgrimage for Our Time:

A Daily Report on the May, 2008

“Witness Against Torture” Trial

Entry 1:

Sunday, May 25, 2008

By Ken Butigan

Beginning Tuesday, I will join 35 others as we make pilgrimage to an American court in Washington, DC on behalf of hundreds of men who have been held without due process at Guantanamo Bay Prison in Cuba. We were arrested at the US Supreme Court on January 11, 2008, an event that was part of a global day of action day marking the sixth year of the opening of the prison. Now we are slated for trial. This daily blog will chronicle the “Witness Against Torture” Trial.

Journey to the US Supreme Court

On the morning of January 10, 2008 I flew to Washington, DC to take part in a nonviolent witness calling for an end to torture at Guantanamo Bay and other nodes of the US torture circuit. I decided to take part in this event organized by Witness Against Torture because I knew that I must find some way to publicly register my noncooperation with torture as policy and practice. What better place to do this but the highest court in the land, the body that – if it wanted to – could render illegitimate what the human spirit in its deepest recesses had long ago passed judgment on: the shock and awe of torture?

There was another reason I climbed aboard a plane headed from Chicago’s Midway Airport to Dulles International in January: to offer a small token of gratitude to and solidarity with Franciscan Friar Louie Vitale, my friend and co-worker at Pace e Bene Nonviolence Service, in the currency he would most value: nonviolent resistance.

At the time, Louie was entering his fourth month of incarceration for taking action challenging torture training at Fort Huachuca in Arizona, the home of the US Army Intelligence School. (On March 14, Louie – and his co-defendant, Fr. Steve Kelly, SJ – were finally released.)

On January 11, the sixth anniversary of the arrival of the first prisoner at Guantanamo, I joined with others to mark this grim anniversary to create a tableau depicting the reality of the practice of US torture. Participants wore the now familiar orange jumpsuits and the black, eyeless hood.

In a very small way we enter symbolically into the reality that, for the inmates at Guantanamo, burns away the symbolism and leaves a bare, concrete horror. The hood suggests the misshapen stump of a head. Living decapitation. As others put their hoods on, I recoil at the sight of the face rubbed away, flattened out, blank. Something at the cellular level rebels, as if our long evolutionary journey reinforced the utter primacy of the face. Tearing away the face like this is the latest in a long line of human failures: the ancient temptation to triumph by obliterating the humanness of others, by making another The Other with a deliberate finality.

Or so we think.

Torture and the Nonviolent Life

Walking on through the foothills of the nonviolent life

Ken Butigan — Thu, 15 May 2008 20:24:21 -0500

Walking On through the Foothills of the Nonviolent Life

I am walking in the sprawling woods that hug the southern edge of Puget Sound. In every direction the thick tangle of firs and maples are knitted together by an endless riot of waist-high ferns whose lime-green fronds stand out sharply in the dreamy languorous pall cast by the forest’s crowded canopy.

The trail is narrow. It gradually descends toward the water, but circuitously: skirting a ravine, giving wide berth to a cluster of trees that look old and solemn with their weathered bark and the graceful bending of limbs as they rise. A heavy storm has moved through the area this week and, though it is not raining now, the rich, black soil is moist. My boots sink slowly into the damp earth as I near one of the creeks here. Crossing, I scamper up from it and then connect again with the trail that heads me toward the sound.

Then, suddenly, as the trail swerves west, piercing shafts of lights break through the upper branches of the trees. I am dazzled by these shards of sunlight that have appeared so unexpectedly. Sharp, unrelenting, translucent, these bursts -- which seem to make everything else so much darker-- strike me as precious and even miraculous. I spent a good part of my life in California – San Diego, San Francisco, Berkeley, Oakland -- where sunlight, no less a miracle, could often be counted on, expected. Not always, but often, I would lose the edge of wonder. This is not possible here in the Pacific Northwest where there is often the thought in the air that a rich and somber and enveloping darkness is somehow always at the edges of things.

Now, as I begin to descend more rapidly. I will soon be at the shore with its stones and barnacles and views of another peninsula and islands and, to the southwest, the undulating hills of the Capitol Forest. I am struck with silent gratitude for these brilliant and stunning and fleeting bits of light.

Bold Steps Needed to End War in Iraq

Ken Butigan — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 17:21:38 -0600

Why We Will Risk Peace at the US Capitol

By Ken Butigan

In 1956, John F. Kennedy published Profiles in Courage, a book that chronicled the actions of eight US senators who put the nation’s interests above their own. Like many fearless acts, these decisions were, at the time, shocking, counter-intuitive, and often taken at great cost. They sometimes involved crossing party lines or defying public opinion. In almost all cases, they meant risking one’s own political power and status.

Such actions, virtually by definition, are rare. But rare or not, they are needed now more than ever.

Eighteen months ago, the Congressional leadership changed hands. The Democrats were swept into power with a mandate to end the US war in Iraq. Nevertheless, the war continues. The Pentagon, while touting a plan to withdraw some troops, has recently announced an expected “pause” in the draw down. The US occupation of Iraq – with over 130,000 troops and a network of bases -- could very well continue far into the future.

Bold, courageous, and even politically risky action from the Congress is required to create a concrete plan to end the war and to promote a just and lasting peace.

That is why representatives of numerous religious traditions, communities and denominations will gather at the US Capitol on Friday, March 7. The Olive Branch Interfaith Peace Partnership will host the 2008 Interfaith Peace Witness for Iraq, in which we will pray in houses of worship across Capitol Hill and then gather in the shadow of the Capitol.

We will then bring our call for an end to the war to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi. (Currently, delegations of religious leaders are seeking meetings with these two religious leaders at this time.)

Some of us, as part of this solemn event, will face arrest to prayerfully underscore that, on the eve of the fifth anniversary of the war, our nation and its leadership must vote for nonviolent solutions instead of billions for more carnage – even as the Congress contemplates passing a new $102 billion war-funding supplemental.

By taking these small steps, we seek to invite all of us – citizens everywhere, our leaders, and ourselves – to summon the courage to put love in action, to go to the ends of the earth to make real peace, to call a time-out to business as usual, to respond to the emergency like a brigade of ambulance drivers, as Dr. King put it so well years ago.

We will take this moment to ask that each of us to interrupt the smoothly running machine of officially-sanctioned and dutifully performed violence with acts of creative nonviolence, no matter how shocking, counter-intuitive, or costly.

Please consider joining us this Friday!

Christian Peace Witness for Iraq