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You are invited to a special fundraising dinner to meet Janis Karpinski,
Brig. General (Ret.) and former commander of Abu Ghraib, and Craig Murray, former U.K. ambassador to Uzbekistan, who both testified at the
International Commission of Inquiry on Crimes Against Humanity Committed by the Bush Administration.
The dinner will be held on Thursday, April 27th, at 5:00PM and hosted by the Commission and Brookline PeaceWorks to raise funds for bringing these important voices to college campuses throughout the U.S. After two programs in Boston this week (Harvard Law School on the 26th; MIT on the 27th), "Speaking the Unspeakable: The Bush Crimes Commission on Campus Tour" will be going to UC Berkeley, Stanford, University of Chicago, and University of Washington-Seattle, with others lining up fall programs. Our goal is to bring the tour to college campuses in all 50 states, and with your help we can do it.
This dinner will be a chance to talk directly to the insiders, the
whistleblowers; to hear about the role these truth tellers are playing in
society now; and to explore together ways to use this tour to help shift the dialogue in this country. Framing the Bush-Chaney actions as crimes against humanity, backed by rigorous evidence, can expose the administration's criminality, strip it of moral and political legitimacy, and fuel the kind of mass movement that is necessary to repudiate the Bush Program and drive this cabal from office.
Join us for conversation and dinner, before the event at MIT on Thursday,
April 27, at 5pm.
Requested donation: $250 to $100
Checks can be made payable to Not In Our Name. (The NION Statement of
Conscience initiated the International Commission of Inquiry on Crimes
Against Humanity Committed by the Bush Administration.)
RSVP: bushcrimestour2006@hotmail.com or call 917-687-6453
*****
Craig Murray, Murray was honored by a group of former U.S. intelligence officers named Sam Adams Associates for Integrity in Intelligence (SAAII), whose annual awardees include FBI special agent Coleen Rowley (2002), British intelligence whistleblower Katharine Gun (2003), and former FBI translator Sibel Edmonds (2004).
On receiving the Samuel Adams Award:
"I would like to say something about the advance of evil and how easily it advances. I genuinely at no stage felt I was doing anything either heroic or exceptional. When I came across cases of people being boiled alive, cases of daughters being raped in front of their fathers, cases of torture of children, and the fact that we were receiving intelligence from those torture sessions, it seemed to me axiomatic that anyone brought up in the United States or the United Kingdom would believe their overriding and only duty was to stop it. And, perhaps naively, when I started trying to stop it internally, I actually believed that this must be the work of renegade people at lower levels and that once senior politicians in the UK and US knew what was happening, they would stop it. I was quickly disillusioned. I discovered this part of a wider international policy of the use of torture in the pursuit of the war on terror. It was a terrible moment for me. I discovered that the system and the country I'd served my whole life didn't stand for what I believed it did. And I went to meetings with colleagues of mine. People I had known for over 20 years. Ordinary nice people who were setting down on paper strategies by which what we were doing could be said not to circumvent the UN convention against torture. And I was looking at them thinking, "I know you. I know you. We've drunk together. We've played golf together. You are setting up justification for torture. How did this come about?"
This may sound exaggerated. But it isn't. At that moment I understood how
some civil servant ended up writing out the orders for cattle trucks to go to Auschwitz, and felt they were only "doing their job." And ladies and gentlemen, that is what we face now: the flight toward fascism."
... I want to make one more point before that, which is just to say, I don't believe it works, but even if it did work, I would personally rather die than have anyone tortured to save my life, and I'm quite sure that's what you all believe too. Thank you." -- Craig Murray, former British ambassador to Uzbekistan who resigned over the use of intelligence from prisoners rendered to Uzbekistan for torture.
Janis Karpinski:
"I went down to Abu Ghraib the next morning. Nobody would talk about
anything. They didn't know. The people who were there-the Graniers, the
Englands, the Fredricks-- they had already been removed not only from their duty and their positions but from Abu Ghraib. They were being held in another location. I spoke to the sergeant there and asked 'what is going on?' He said, 'Ma'am, I don't know. I don't work here, but they told me to come over here because I worked here before.' I said: 'Where are your logs, let me see if I can try to put this together.' And he said, 'We don't have any logs, they took everything, so we started a new one.' And I said, 'Any files, memorandums?' And he said, 'The only memorandum is the one that's posted out here'--it was posted on a column, in the cellblock, right outside this little admin office. That memorandum was signed by the Secretary of Defense, Don Rumsfeld. It was one page, and he authorized sleep deprivation, stress positions, meal disruption--serving their meals late, not serving a meal. Leaving the lights on all night while playing loud music. Issuing insults or criticism of their religion, their culture, their beliefs. In the margin on the left-hand side," handwriting]. "It said, 'Make sure this happens!!' With two exclamation
points. And it was written alongside of the list of the interrogation
techniques." -- Janis Karpinski, Brig. General (Ret), former commander of Abu Ghraib and all prisons in Iraq who forcefully argues that the bulk of the blame for the Abu Ghraib scandal goes to the very top of the chain of command
Thursday at MIT
Co-sponsored by Brookline PeaceWorks:
The Bush Administration’s War Crimes and Crimes Against Humanity:
Come hear the Evidence
Thursday, April 27, 7:00 P.M
M.I.T Room 10-250
Speakers: Janis Karpinsky, Craig Murray and Larry Everest
Open to the public.
Witness: Craig Murray--former British ambassador to Uzbekistan who resigned over the use of intelligence from prisoners rendered to Uzbekistan for torture.
"I went to meetings with colleagues of mine, people I had known for over 20 years, ordinary, nice people who were setting down on paper strategies by which what we were doing could be said not to circumvent the U.N. Convention against Torture. . . . At that moment I understood how some civil servant ended up writing out the orders for cattle trucks to go to Auschwitz and felt they were only doing their job."
Witness: Janis Karpinski (U.S. army ret.)--former commander of Abu Ghraib and all prisons in Iraq.
"General Miller and General Sanchez would not have implemented a new set of techniques without the approval of … Secretary of Defense . The Secretary of Defense would not have authorized without the approval of the Vice President."
C. Clark Kissinger, convener of the Commission of Inquiry on Crimes Against Humanity Committed by the Bush Administration (www.bushcommission.org).
Larry Everest--author of Oil, Power, and Empire: Iraq and the U.S. Global Agenda and Commission prosecutor on the indictment on Wars of Aggression.
Will we continue to tolerate Crimes Against Humanity committed in our name?
The M.I.T event on the Bush Administration's War Crimes and Crimes Against Humanity is sponsored by:
-Commission of Inquiry on Crimes Against Humanity,
-Boston Mobilization
-The World Can't Wait--Drive Out the Bush Regime!
-Brookline Peaceworks
-The MIT Thistle
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