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From the Open-Publishing Calendar
From the Open-Publishing Newswire
Indybay Feature

Discussion & book signing by UK author, Andy Worthington, author of The Guantanamo Files

Date:
Wednesday, November 11, 2009
Time:
7:00 PM - 9:00 PM
Event Type:
Speaker
Organizer/Author:
Revolution Books
Email:
Phone:
510-848-1196
Address:
2425 Channing Way (off of Telegraph Avenue)
Location Details:
Revolution Books 2425 Channing Way (in the Sather Gate Parking Mall off of Telegraph Avenue) Wheelchair accessible, donations accepted.

On 11 January 2002, exactly four months after the terrible events of 9/11, the first of 774 prisoners arrived at a specially constructed prison on a US naval base in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. Until recently, it was impossible to tell the stories of these men. Held without charge, without trial, without access to their families, and, initially, without access to lawyers, they are part of a peculiarly lawless experiment conducted by the US administration, which has chosen to disregard both the Geneva Conventions and the established rules of war, holding the men not as criminals or as Prisoners of War, but as “illegal enemy combatants,” a category of prisoner which is itself illegal. Beginning with the US-led invasion of Afghanistan in October 2001, The Guantánamo Files explains, in detail, the genesis of the prison, its counterparts in Afghanistan, its development from 2002 to the present day, its role as a prison devoted to interrogation and torture, the legal challenges that have been launched against the administration, and the network of secret prisons that underpins Guantánamo’s brutal illegality. More importantly, The Guantánamo Files allows the prisoners to tell their own stories, explaining who they are and the circumstances of their capture. In contrast to the administration’s claims that they are the “worst of the worst,” what the stories reveal most of all is that very few of them had anything to do with al-Qaeda, and the vast majority were either Taliban foot soldiers, recruited to fight an inter-Muslim civil war in Afghanistan that began long before 9/11, or humanitarian aid workers, religious teachers and economic migrants, who were, for the most part, sold to the Americans by their allies in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Bringing these stories to life for the first time, The Guantánamo Files vividly demonstrates the human cost of the administration’s ill-conceived and violently executed “War on Terror.”
Added to the calendar on Mon, Nov 9, 2009 4:47PM
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