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

The wager of the nonviolent life is that the human face is primordial: that underneath the hood (whatever its current or ancient vestiture) humanness exists and even thrives  in all its baffling woundedness and sacredness.  The nonviolent life is a series of awakenings and experiments that invites us to profoundly short-circuit the reigning “hooding” and its relentless and seemingly omnipotent capacity for erasure. 
 
The nonviolent life proceeds with the conviction that this tendency toward the obliteration of humanness need not have the final word.  To the extent that it is engaged and challenged it does not have the final word.  To the extent that the web of life in its infinite fragility and resilience is understood as being more primordial than any system that presumes to be absolute, this dehumanizing power does not establish this smothering totality.  To the extent that you and I withdraw our hearts, minds, and bodies from this seductive promise, the tenacity and power of death is not final. 
 
The nonviolent life wagers that life is stronger than death. 
 
This has been most immediately evident to me when those I have known and loved have died.  Here is a profound experience of life after death: the bewildering experience that our life remains even as the beloved’s ends.
 
Those of us who survive — “live on” — receive in our trembling hands the power of this loved one’s death and this loved one’s life.  This life, while utterly and unarguably gone in an implacable way, exists in a new way now, woven into the substance of our own living. 
 
It is now given to those of us who “go on” to honor this finished life in a way that the one who lived it could never do in the fullest sense.  Doing so we discover that what is “finished” is never completely finished.  We glimpse and engage with the inexhaustible fullness  of this life — the woundedness and sacredness in its totality — that our loved one could not always see from  “within” her or his lived life, and it is this infinite fullness that is not confined.  This giving and receiving and giving back is the dead’s gift to the living and the living’s gift to the dead.

We went to the Supreme Court seeking not so much to present a political or moral discourse but to dramatize the presence, the absence, that exceeds all discourse. 

Now, we are taking the next step: taking this call for change into our trial that begins Tuesday.
 

Check for Entry 2 on Monday, May 26 on the Pace e Bene Home Page, when I will report the triasl rehearsal:  The defendants prepare  together for the trial that begins on Tuesday.

For More Information about the trial, click here!

Photos by Frida