Feature Archives

Over the July 4th traffic on Interstate 80, “torture victims and detainees” staged a banner display on the University Avenue overpass in Berkeley. World Can’t Wait has demonstrated on this overpass action every 4th of July since 2006. This year the focus was on the torture state forged under Bush – and now being continued and refined by Obama – as witnessed by the thousands who passed the display. The act of civil disobedience slowed northbound traffic along I-80.

Cynthia Papermaster and Susan Harman write: "Ninth Circuit Judge Jay Bybee was confronted by three torture accountability activists in a Pasadena courtroom who called out to him to resign for giving legal approval to interrogation techniques amounting to torture. He was so surprised that he stopped and listened to the three women, Cynthia Papermaster, Susan Harman, and Dianne Wright while they told him he is unfit to be a judge and should resign."

Shortly before midnight on Sunday, June 28th, a demonstration will begin at Vandenberg Air Force Base to protest the U.S. launch of a Minuteman III nuclear missile. The target of the rocket is the Ronald Reagan Ballistic Missile Defense Test Site, Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands, South Pacific.

On May 28th in San Francisco, World Can’t Wait, National Lawyers Guild, Code Pink, the Berkeley Fellowship of Unitarian Universalists, and National Accountability Network gathered at the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals to demand that Judge Bybee be disbarred and prosecuted for codifying specific torture tactics and for giving high Bush administration officials immunity protections from both civil and criminal suit.

At the May 16th ceremony for UC Berkeley's Boalt Hall law school graduates, World Can't Wait protested against Boalt Hall Law Professor and author of U.S. torture memos, John Yoo. The protest against torture called on graduates to demand that the UC law school not tolerate torture and those who are apologists for torture policies.

Ciaran Dubhuidhe writes: We Americans like to think of ourselves as civilized people. Historically, we have supported our government in war under the belief that our government and our soldiers are honorable and that we do not engage in unjust wars. Ugly things like genocide, torture, naked aggression, raping, pillaging, and scorched earth policies are things that others do, not us. Since we are so good and virginal in every sense, we reason that others hate us only because of our goodness and purity.

Dharshan Chandramohan writes: Brothers and sisters, I am an ஈழம் தமிழர் — For those of you who don't know, that means that I am Tamil by ethnicity; and that my roots are unshakably and unmistakably planted in the Northern land of the country called Sri Lanka. I have to say this — over and over — because like in Palestine, there are droves of people who claim that I do not exist, that my people are not indigenous to the land that we have lived on for centuries, that they have a legitimate claim — moreover, a religious, sacred claim to that land.