Inside the Capitol Rotunda (Jan 21)

Fourteen Witness Against Torture activists entered the Rotunda of the U.S. Capitol while dozens more were gathered outside.  The Rotunda is site where U.S. presidents are waked, before burial.  The U.S. government calls it the "Temple of Liberty" and the "Stage of the Nation."  The activists formed a semicircle around the white circle in the Rotunda which designates the spot from which a new president departs for his inauguration and to which a president's body is returned after he dies.  They unfurled a banner bearing the names of three men who purportedly had committed suicide in Guantanamo.  Recent reports suggest that these men may have been tortured to the point of death and murdered.  None of the men had been convicted of a crime and two of them, all though they themselves didn't know it, had been cleared for release.  All three had struggled as hunger strikers to improve the conditions they bore, in Guantanamo.

The activists scattered rose petals around the banner and expressed their remorse for the broken promises, broken laws and broken lives.

Carmen Trotta addressed the listeners:

So then, if this is truly the "Temple of Liberty" then we must pray. And that in mourning, for the spirit of Liberty is itself imperiled.

We gather today on the first anniversary of a uniquely new administration, one that captured not merely the imagination of the American people, but the hearts and minds people throughout the world.

President Obama promised a restoration of the rule of law.  More, he promised to eliminate the great enemy of freedom; cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment and state sponsored torture - perverse policies adopted by the prior administration.  But the detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, remains open, detaining nearly 200 Muslim men without charge or trial, subjected to ill treatment for eight years.  At the Bagram prison in Afghanistan, the U.S. is detaining over 600 Muslim men.  Construction has begun to expand  Bagram to hold many more. Conditions and treatment at Bagram have always been worse than those at Guantanamo. We have no allegations of cattle prods being used at Guantanamo - we do at Bagram. We even have allegations of the crudest forms of torture at Bagram, like the injection of gasoline into the anuses of detainees. As all requests for independent humanitarian assessments of both facilities have been denied, we have no reason to believe that coercive interrogations have been ended.

So, Obama's broken promises are added then, to the broken laws of his predecessors. Add further, the literally millions of broken lives that result from our several wars...yes the spirit of liberty is imperiled. The enormity of these crimes  defies easy comprehension. But recent news has put a harrowing human face on the matter.

Let us begin, this day, compelled by the enormity of the events, to commemorate the lives of Salah Ahmed Al Salami, Mani Shaman Al Utaybi, and Yaser Talal Al Zahrani, three men who died in Guantanamo in 2006.  For four years the powers that be told us that these deaths were suicides, - which should have been enough to rouse the consciences of a free people.  Now it appears far more likely that these innocent Muslim brothers were tortured to death. 

Who is responsible for such a crime?  Will a process ever be initiated to find the actual perpetrators? And what of the architects of the policies, - Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Addington, Cambrone, Gonzalez, Yoo, and Rice? 

If the truth be told, we are all responsible. And so we would like to initiate a period of mourning over these lost lives, and we call upon the American people to join us.

We cannot think of a more fitting place to begin our commitment to change than here in the Temple of Liberty.  For if the cause of freedom has any prospect, it needs to pass through this crucible of truth and thus purified, issue in a new birth of freedom.