Interview with S. Brian Willson on Cable TV from Portland, Oregon, about His
Hunger Strike to Close Guantanamo (47 Minutes) - June 2nd, 2013
www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q0fouqOtojI&feature=share
S. Brian Willson's Latest Guantanamo Fast Solidarity Statement - June 4th,
2013
My Personal Fast
I have been on a 300-calorie-a-day indefinite hunger strike since Sunday
evening, May 12. As of today, having completed 23 days of fasting, I have
lost nearly 21 pounds. My participation in this strike was prompted by the
decision of 130-140 prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba (where 166 total
prisoners have been held, without charge or chance for trial, for as long as
10+ years) to embark on a hunger strike to protest their continued long
captivity and tortured treatment. Since their fasting commenced, many have
been force-fed with tubes rammed into their noses and down into their
stomachs, causing bleeding and vomiting, while chained from head to foot in
a chair. These men have not seen their families since being brutally
snatched from their home communities beginning in 2001 upon directives from
the U.S. government and its secret operatives, who are known to have freely
handed out lucrative bounties to those who would finger someone, anyone. The
continuing captivity and maltreatment of these prisoners is medieval,
barbaric, sadistic, and grotesquely illegal according to both U.S. and
international law. It dehumanizes all of us.
The Most Salient Question
For me, the salient question is: What is the proportionate response when one
knows his or her government has waged, for twelve years, and continues, a
Global War OF Terror, committing on an ongoing basis the supreme
international crime of aggression (Nuremberg) against a multitude of
countries around the world, while participating in the associated war crimes
and crimes against humanity, murdering as many as two million innocent human
beings, maiming and displacing millions of others, while torturing
thousands, destabilizing regions for years, even decades to come? Meanwhile,
domestic repression tightens the noose on any effective dissent. The 2001
Patriot Act eliminated Habeas Corpus for foreigners, as the 2011 National
Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) eliminated it for U.S. citizens deemed by
the President as "terrorists." Please tell me: What is the proportionate
response to all this diabolical criminality and barbarity?
Though there may not be a simple answer, this is a most important question.
I viscerally feel the pain of the Guantanamo prisoners. Each of these
individual's odyssey began with being kidnapped, hooded, and continually
shackled while being transported from one torture prison to another, until
finally flown (hooded and shackled) to the U.S. gulag known as Guantanamo.
The U.S. has acknowledged at least 100 of the prisoners were murdered during
the torture process, before arriving at Guantanamo, ruling the deaths as
homicides. The U.S. military prison at Guantanamo is located within a
45-square-mile parcel of land forcefully taken from the Cuban people in the
1898 (illegal) Spanish-American War.
Preserving my humanity requires me to do something, as I strive to express
unmistakable solidarity with the pain and suffering of the prisoners who
remain at Guantanamo. As Socialist Eugene Debs declared, "While there is a
soul in prison, I am not free."
U.S. Pattern of Imperialism is Entrenched
Since my birth on July 4, 1941, my country has overtly, militarily invaded
dozens of countries at least 390 times, covertly interfering in other
countries' sovereignty thousands of times, while bombing 28 of them. I
personally witnessed grotesque atrocities against the Vietnamese people, and
subsequently witnessed illegal and barbaric U.S. policies at work in
Nicaragua, El Salvador, Haiti, Israel/Palestine, Iraq, Colombia, among
others. Drones, our newest killing invention, have added another inherently
destructive technology to the global murder arsenal, enabling the President
to decide anyone labeled "terrorist" can be murdered with premeditation, any
place, any time, such decisions being made at his whim, in secrecy, with no
accountability. The U.S. is now a totalitarian state that has eliminated
basic principles established some 800 years ago with the Magna Carta. Smart
bombs and smart missiles are in fact really dumb because they directly
create more enraged enemies, endangering the U.S. American people. In my
eyes, the U.S. President is a totalitarian monster no less than the worst
monarchs and dictators in world history.
The Gated Society: The U.S. love affair with incarceration, solitary
confinement and torture
I live in a country that imprisons more than 2.5 million of its citizens on
an average day in more than 9,000 jails and prisons, boasting the highest
per capita detention rate in the world by far - 800 prisoners for every
100,000 people [Local jails: 745,000; state and federal adult prisons:
1,600,000; juvenile facilities: 141,000; and immigrant detention: 34,000 =
Grand Total: 2,520,000 U.S. prisoners]. Rwanda has the second highest
detention rate at 595; Russia comes in third at 568. The world's average per
capita detention rate is 146.
More than 60 percent of U.S. prisoners are from racial and ethnic minority
groups yet they comprise only 36 percent of the general population. The
U.S., with 4.6 percent of the world's population, holds 25 percent of the
world's prisoners. At least 80,000 of these, and as many 110,000, are locked
up in solitary confinement in facilities for years such as continues at
Pelican Bay Prison in California, and Angola Penitentiary in Louisiana,
among dozens of locations. Being held in solitary for more than 15 days was
determined in 2011 by the UN Special Rapporteur to begin devastating, often
irreversible physical and mental ill effects, and is therefore considered
torture. Force-feeding of prisoners on hunger strikes in the U.S. is also
not unusual, itself another form of torture in violation of international
law. Solitary confinement inevitably contributes to increased risks of
prison suicides, of which hundreds are reported every year. Nine Guantanamo
prisoners are reported to have died, and at least six of these deaths were
suicides.
I studied the regular use of torture in Massachusetts prisons in 1981, where
force feeding of striking prisoners was common; as was the withholding of
rights and privileges such as necessary medicine, mail, or winter clothing
during cold weather; the imposition of hazards such as flooding cells,
igniting clothes and bedding, providing too little or too much heat, and
spraying mace and tear gas; inflicting physical beatings of prisoners filing
prison complaints or litigation, of those protesting conditions using hunger
strikes; and various forms of intentional psychological abuse such as
arbitrary shakedown of cells and brutal rectal searches, ordering prisoners
to lie face down on cold floors or the outside ground before receiving food,
and empty announcements of visitors or family only later to say it was a
joke.
During the Spanish-American war in the Philippines, President Teddy
Roosevelt proudly defended water boarding torture as part of the arsenal of
techniques to achieve "the triumph of civilization over the black chaos of
savagery and barbarism" of the Filipinos, or "googoos". The U.S. Marines
used one of the first instances of air power and widespread torture to
overcome a Haitian revolt of "savage monkeys" against the continuing U.S.
presence there in 1920." The word googoo morphed into "gook" as the
derogatory term used by U.S. soldiers against the Vietnamese.
In 1931 President Hoover's Wickersham Report (National Commission on Law
Observance and Enforcement) concluded that the use of torture (intentional
infliction of various methods of pain and suffering) was "widespread"
throughout the entire U.S. criminal justice system. The U.S. school of the
Americas has been teaching torture ("interrogation") to Latin American
military personnel since 1946.
Torture Is U.S. Policy.
Conclusion
Guantanamo continues a long U.S. tradition and pattern of domestic cruelty
to its own prisoners, as it represents the continuation of the supreme
international crimes launched by the U.S. beginning in 2001. This hunger
strike intends to address this chronic pattern by affirming my mantra, "We
are not worth more; they are not worth less".
S. Brian Willson
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The Following Has Been Added by Frank Dorrel.
Feel free to send Brian an email in support of his fast at:
[email protected] . His website is: www.brianwillson.com
Please watch the 9-Minute Trailer for: "PAYING THE PRICE FOR PEACE: The
Story of S. Brian Willson & The Peace Movement" - Directed by Bo Boudart -
Associate Producer Frank Dorrel -
www.youtube.com/watch?v=cKIjfUAnPvY&feature=player_embedded#
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cKIjfUAnPvY&feature=player_embedded>
If you feel inspired to help get this important film finished, please send a
donation to:
Beau Monde Image Foundation
PO Box 7395, Menlo Park, CA 94026
(This is a 501 C-3 organization. So it is Tax Deductable)
Bo has already interviewed Daniel Ellsberg, Father Roy Bourgeois, Medea
Benjamin, Col. Ann Wright, Martin Sheen, Alice Walker, Phil Donahue, Blase
Bonpane, Ron Kovic, Ray McGovern, Charlie Clements, Camila Mejia (Iraq War
Veteran), Bruce Gagnon, Charlie Liteky, Duncan Murphy, Leah Bolger (past
president of Veterans For Peace), Elliot Adams (past president of VFP), Mike
Prysner (Iraq War Veteran), David Swanson, Jeff Paterson (Courage to
Resist), Ed Ellis (VFP-LA) & others. He still plans to interview Amy
Goodman, Kris Kristofferson, Ed Asner, Kathy Kelly & Cindy Sheehan.
Bo Boudart is a producer of wildlife, ecology, cultural, human rights,
cultural, educational and science programs. He has initiated productions in
Asia, Indonesia and Philippine Island Archipelagos, South America, Africa,
Australia, the Arctic, the Caribbean, and throughout the United States.
Boudart has produced documentaries, animations, educational, marketing and
informational programs for distribution in all formats. Many of his programs
have aired on the Discovery Channel, Public Television, Canadian
Broadcasting, NHK Japan, French TV, and the Middle East.
Bo Boudart
Director of: "Paying The Price For Peace"
650-644-7228
[email protected]
www.boboudartproductions.org
Other Important Links for S. Brian Willson
Here is Brian's Interview on Democracy Now with Amy Goodman on October 28th,
2011: www.democracynow.org/2011/10/28/blood_on_the_tracks_brian_willsons
You can watch Brian's 8-minute segment from my film: "What I've Learned
About US Foreign Policy" at:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Rkvl9XHCYU&feature=related
All of Brian's essays on his website are well worth reading:
www.brianwillson.com
Short Autobiography of S. Brian Willson: www.brianwillson.com/autobiography
BLOOD ON THE TRACKS: The Life & Times of S. Brian Willson:
www.addictedtowar.com/SBWillson.html
In Peace,
Frank Dorrel
Associate Producer of: "Paying The Price For Peace"
Publisher of: ADDICTED To WAR
310-838-8131
[email protected]
[email protected]
www.addictedtowar.com
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
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