Monday, January 15, 2018
Solidarity
from Central Cellblock to Guantanamo
These evils, small or large, are all growing from the same roots
of imperial arrogance.
I
participated in the day’s events as part of the Witness Against Torture
community. This was our fourth day of fasting, reflection and action together
and many of us wore orange jump suits and black hoods representing the 41
Muslim men still held there. After the rally, WAT performed a simple ritual,
serving 41 cups of tea one at a time to “detainees” who each lifted their hood
to accept their cup and take a sip before laying it down in a row on the
sidewalk. The names of the men were spoken aloud and had been written on each
of the styrofoam cups, remembering that drawing and writing on such cups has
been one of few outlets for expression for many detainees.
Immediately
after the tea was served, five of us, Ken Jones, Manijeh Saba, Helen
Schietinger, Beth Adams and I, stepped into Pennsylvania Avenue, walking toward
the White House with a banner calling for the release of these 41 along with
the thousands imprisoned in immigration detention centers and the millions of victims
of hyper-incarceration in the US. To approach the White House, we needed to
cross under yellow police line tape and were immediately arrested by uniformed
Secret Service police.
I have
been attending protests at the White House since Jimmy Carter lived there and
with each succeeding administration, the space allowed for political discourse
has been reduced and the once protected free speech of citizens increasingly
criminalized there. Under Trump, half the width of the formerly public sidewalk
in front of the White House is fenced off, the inner perimeter now patrolled by
officers armed with automatic weapons. Pennsylvania Avenue, long ago closed to
vehicular traffic, is now closed off to pedestrians at the hint of a
demonstration. This public forum, a place of protest and advocacy for more than
a century, the place where the vote for women and benefits for veterans were
won, has been strangled to the point where no dissent is tolerated there.
The five
of us were vigorously searched and taken to a local DC Metro Police station
where we were photographed, finger printed and charged with “crossing a police
line.” My four friends were released from the station after a few hours with a
pending court appearance date, as is usual for such petty crimes as ours. I, on
the other hand, was transferred by the Secret Service to the Central Cellblock
to be brought before a judge the next day.
The
booking sergeant told me that if it were up to the Metro Police, I would go
home with my friends. The arresting authority, however, was the Secret Service
and they wanted me held over due to an apparent outstanding case from Las
Vegas. Last April, I was arrested at the armed drone operation center, Creech
Air Force Base in Nevada, for the alleged crime of disturbing the peace. The
District Attorney in Las Vegas declined to file any charge against me (maybe
because I was disturbing the war?) but the chief judge of the Las Vegas Justice
(sic) Court summoned me to appear before him on September 25 anyway.
I made a motion to the court for clarification and received a response from
another judge that I was not required to appear in answer to the summons. I
also got official notice from the DA’s office that they had “determined not to
file formal charges at this time.” Apparently, the chief judge was not happy
with that decision and decided to take the role of prosecutor himself and
issued a warrant for my arrest.
Central
Cellblock is a crowded, noisy, roach infested hot box where all those arrested
and held for various crimes around the city are collected for their initial
appearances in court the next day. I was one of more than 90 men who spent the
day shunted in chains from cell to cell between the jail and the court. Of
these, there was one Latino and a young man from Mauritania, the rest African
American. I was the only white man arrested in all of Washington, DC, on
January 11 that the authorities chose to keep in jail.
Late Friday afternoon
the United States Attorney decided not to press the “crossing a police line”
against the five of us and so I was released before coming to court. Had I
appeared before a judge, the government would likely have asked the court to
hold me over for extradition as a fugitive from justice in Nevada. If this were
granted, the Las Vegas authorities would then have had three days to come to DC
to fetch me if they cared to.
In our
group planning the events of January 11, the question came up about the
usefulness of risking arrest for this cause. For myself, beyond strategic
benefits, is the issue of solidarity. Just as we fast for a few days as a small
gesture of sharing the suffering of the brothers in Guantanamo on hunger
strike, so arrest and a few hours in a police station cell can bring us closer
to understanding their unjust confinement. My intention was more than realized
this time! The suppression of free speech in front of the White House is not
the crackdown on the Arab Spring in Bahrain and Central Cellblock is not Abu
Ghraib. My would-be extradition to Las Vegas is not “special rendition” to Jordan
or to Guantanamo. These evils, small or large, are all growing from the same
roots of imperial arrogance and in our different places and conditions, we are
in this struggle together.
This work
is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License
Brian Terrell is a co-coordinator
for Voices for
Creative Nonviolence and lives on a Catholic Worker Farm in
Maloy, Iowa.
Donations can be sent
to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD
21218. Ph: 410-323-1607; Email: mobuszewski2001 [at] comcast.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/
"The master class
has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.
The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject
class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their
lives." Eugene Victor Debs
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