News Release

Torture: * Prosecution * Protest

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FRANCIS BOYLE
Boyle, a professor at the University of Illinois College of Law in Champaign, earlier this week submitted a complaint to the International Criminal Court charging Bush, Cheney, et. al with crimes relating to the “extraordinary rendition” and illegal detention of individuals. While the U.S. is not a signatory to the ICC, Boyle notes that many people detained by the Bush administration where detained in countries that were signatories of the ICC at the time of detention, and thus the Court has jurisdiction on those cases. See the complaint by Boyle to the prosecutor of the ICC, Luis Moreno-Ocampo.

MATT DALOISIO
Under the banner “Broken Promises, Broken Laws, Broken Lives,” the group Witness Against Torture is holding a series of protests today. About 40 members of the group were arrested today inside and outside the Capitol; video is expected shortly at the group’s webpage.
Daloisio is a member of the group, which notes that tomorrow marks the one-year anniversary of Obama “signing executive orders outlawing torture and committing his administration to closing Guantanamo within a year.”
The group said today: “The United States continues to detain dozens of men at Guantanamo who have been cleared for release. In addition, the Obama administration is expanding the prison at Bagram [in Afghanistan], and [is] proposing indefinite detention without charge or trial for many and an Illinois prison facility for others. We see President Obama trying to replace the lawlessness of Guantanamo with a ‘legal black hole’ in the continental United States. The laws are broken.” The group states that “the day of action follows a twelve-day fast and vigil for justice.”
Some of their protests focus on three individuals — Salah Ahmed Al-Salami, Mani Shaman Al-Utaybi and Yasser Talal Al-Zahrani — held at Guantanamo who were reported to have committed suicide in 2006, but a recently published investigation by Scott Horton for Harper’s magazine finds that they were likely tortured to death. See: “The Guantanamo ‘Suicides’: A Camp Delta sergeant blows the whistle.”

For more information, contact at the Institute for Public Accuracy:
Sam Husseini, (202) 347-0020; or David Zupan, (541) 484-9167