Berkeley Pedestrian Bridge becomes an awareness activist action against torture/censorship

July 4th, 2009, began around noon at the Berkeley pedestrian bridge above HW 80 and connecting Aquatic Park with the Berkeley Marina.

In light of the fact that the Obama administration has not publicly repudiate the state torture policies established by John Yoo and the Bush administration there is continual civil unrest on the issue of torture and censorship in the USA.

The Obama administration's torture policy can be interpreted as very similar to the Bush administration in that within the guidelines of national security US torture policy currently severely limits international law under US foreign policy and removes freedoms such as habeas corpus to suspected terrorists, and prisoners of war.

These are frightening aspects of the neo-liberalist corporate globalization, and the police state in which it serves.

On May 23, 2004 The New York Times Magazine's main topic was by Susan Sontag, and the article regarded the then released photographs of prisoners in Abu Ghraib, where she notes Rumsfeld's aversion to using the terminology "torture", and simply citing the incident as "abuse," and "humiliation."

"Words alter, words add, words subtract. It was the strenuous avoidance of the word "genocide" while some 800,000 Tutsis in Rwanda were being slaughtered, over a few weeks' time, by their Hutu neighbors 10 years ago that indicated the American government had no intention of doing anything. To refuse to call what took place in Abu Ghraib - and what has taken place elsewhere in Iraq and in Afghanistan and at Guantanamo Bay - by its true name, torture, is as outrageous as the refusal to call the Rwandan genocid a genocid. Here is one of the definitions of torture contained in a convention to which the United States is a signatory:

"any act by which sever pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a thrid person information or a confession."

(The definition comes from the 1984 Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment. Similar definitions have existed for some time in customary law and in treaties, starting with Article 3 - common to the four Geneva conventions of 1949 - and many recent human rights conventions.) The 1984 convention declares,

"No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat of war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture."

And all covenants on torture specify that it includes treatment intended to humiliate the victim, like leaviing prisoners naked in cells and corridors."

The Photographs are us. Regarding the torture of others: Notes on what has been done - and why - to prisoners, by Americans, Page 25, Ibid.