WASHINGTON, DC--Thirty-seven members of Witness Against Torture were arrested in front of the White House on Thursday, January 12 around three this afternoon. Dressed in the iconic Guantanamo orange jumpsuits and black hoods and accompanied by a cage representing indefinite detention, the activists were warned to clear the sidewalk by National Park Police or risk arrest. After occupying the sidewalk for more than three hours, they were arrested one by one.
“We came to the White House because just eleven days ago, President Obama signed the National Defense Authorization Act. It is dead wrong,” says Leah Grady Sayvetz, an activist and college student form Ithaca, New York arrested this afternoon. “The NDAA makes Guantanamo near-permanent and expands detention powers just when this terrible and immoral detention apparatus should be being dismantled.”
The activists held signs that said: “NDAA is Guantanamo Forever,” NDAA is Guantanamo Come Home,” “Shut Down Guantanamo,” “Shut Down Bagram,” “Release Those Unjustly Bound” and pulled a full-size cage up on the side walk.
Witness Against Torture took the cage to the White House on Saturday, January 7 and began a twenty-four hour a day vigil that ended on January 11 at the end of the Ten Years Too Many National Day of Action to Shut Down Guantanamo.
Witness Against Torture, a grassroots movement to shut down Guantanamo, is completed a ten day “Hungering for Justice” liquids-only fast January 12. About one hundred people—in DC and around the country—participated in the fast and engaged in daily actions in front of the White House, and elsewhere to call attention to the terrible injustice that is Guantanamo, Bagram, and secret prisons.
For more information, visit:
www.witnesstorture.org
Photos, photos, photos!
Nearly 300 photos of 2012 Witness Against Torture were taken by Justin Norman, justin@shriekingtree.com from Des Moines, Iowa.
A slide show of these photos is here.
you have to wonder, what made him to an "about face" about closing gtmo?
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