Report on NYC - January 31:
Protesters gathered in front of the CNN offices at the TimeWarner Building, amid heavy police presence. Professional actors did a demonstration of waterboarding, which a crowd stopped to watch.
Many people stopped to say they didn't know what waterboarding was, or that they had heard something on the news about Mukasey not identifying it as torture. [click below to get except of waterboarding demo at Columbus Circle]
40 people took off on a march to Fox News, and then to the Armed Forces Recruiting Office at Times Square, where the building was closed all day. Several high school students sat in front of the doors. The last stop was at a corner of Bryant Park, across from the former Verizon Headquarters, where we talked to passersby about torture adn the "Protect America Act" expanding the powers of the federal government to surveil citizens' email and phone calls.
What kind of regime subjects prisoners to waterboarding, and then claims it’s not torture? What kind of regime videotapes this and then destroys the tapes? What kind of regime holds hundreds of prisoners for years without charges, access to lawyers or family or granting them a trial?
Answer: A regime that needs to be driven from office!
Answer: A regime that needs to be driven from office!
Torture concentrates the whole package of crimes against humanity committed by the Bush regime – murderous war in Iraq, snatching of immigrant children from the arms of their mothers, systematic spying, and much more – horrors done for global empire and domestic order. All this must be brought to a halt.
Will the elections repudiate or reverse this? NO!
Leading Republican presidential candidates want more of the Bush program, and no leading Democratic presidential candidate will reverse what’s been set in place by the Bush regime. Leading Democrats knew - and said nothing for years - about the CIA’s torture tapes and waterboarding. Who among the leading candidates is making the repeal of the Military Commissions Act or the Patriot Act; or an immediate and unconditional end to the slaughter in Iraq a major part of their campaign?
January 31 – days before the election circus kicks into high gear on “Super Tuesday”– needs to be marked by the voice of the people who repudiate the Bush Regime and its criminal program.
The time to act is now. The scandal of the destroyed torture tapes continues, heightening both the opportunity and the necessity for a mass outpouring of resistance to torture and to the entire Bush program that it represents.
We will make the future.
We pledge to stop endless war for empire.
We refuse consent to a torture state.
We won’t swallow a hateful culture of bigotry & intolerance.
We will not go silently into a fascist nightmare.
We will engage in an act of civil resistance to make a better world.
We are what we’ve been waiting for.
Download a flyer and spread the word!
Download a small poster and spread the word!
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