Torture Awareness Month: Air Torture

Amnesty has set up a parody site, Air Torture, to promote the very serious "extraordinary rendition" action which I blogged about previously. Amenities on Air Torture:

All Air Torture reservations are booked through government intelligence agencies.

Air Torture takes seatbelts to a whole new level, providing passengers with restrains such as shackling in uncomfortable positions for the duration of their flight, and amenities such as hooding. As an added bonus, we'll forcibly drug you so you can spend the entire trip in a disoriented state!

Air Torture respects your privacy. We won't tell your family or loved ones where you are, what's happened to you, or when you'll be back - ever! It will be just like you disappeared.

Visit the site to book a flight! Print a Boarding Pass! "Ground Air Torture" is certainly a handier catch phrase, for those who can appreciate the dark humor, than "extraordinary rendition", as those of us who have been wrapping our tongues around that phrase can attest. We didn't have any trouble last Sunday with it though, as we collected 110+ signatures opposing the outsourcing of torture to third countries in a little more than an hour. (Thanks Marti, Stevi and All Saints!)

China Activist Weekly

A quick note to highlight a blog, China Activist Weekly, I've added to the sidebar that consolidates human rights news and actions on China from various sources and is maintained by another Amnesty volunteer. I wish we had had such a resource when we were campaigning for prisonsers of conscience in Tibet! I'm counting on a few of my Readers to have developed enough on-going interest in human rights in China to use this resource regularly.

Searching for Heroes: The Noodle Maker and Lei Feng

A little added context for our discussion of Ma Jian's, The Noodle Maker:

The excellent site on the history of the Cultural Revolution, Morning Sun, offers some background on the propaganda hero Lei Feng. Check out the video snippets of the film, Lei Feng, which reference some familiar imagery from the book here and here. And here is a series of articles about various efforts to resuscitate the propganda hero, beginning in 1987, so our fictional writer's quest to find the new Lei Feng is well-grounded in fact. (Note also the more recent attempt to use Lei Feng to counter the Falun Gong!) Additional Lei Feng background and memorabilia can be explored at Stefan Landsberger's Chinese Propaganda Poster Pages.

Morning Sun also features a complete version of the lovely subversive bestiary, part of which I shared at our recent non-virtual meeting.

For October: Beasts of No Nation

For October, we have selected Uzodinma Iweala's Beasts of No Nation. (This book will be out in paperback in August.)

In this stunning debut novel, Agu, a young boy in an unnamed West African nation, is recruited into a unit of guerrilla fighters as civil war engulfs his country. Haunted by his father's own death at the hands of militants, which he fled just before witnessing, Agu is vulnerable to the dangerous yet paternal nature of his new commander.

While the war rages on, Agu becomes increasingly divorced from the life he had known before the conflict started — a life of school friends, church services, and time with his family still intact. As he vividly recalls these sunnier times, his daily reality spins further downward into inexplicable brutality, primal fear, and loss of selfhood. His relationship with his commander deepens even as it darkens, and his camaraderie with a fellow soldier lends a deceptive sense of normalcy to his experience.

In a powerful, strikingly original voice that vividly captures Agu's youth and confusion, Uzodinma Iweala has produced a harrowing, deeply affecting novel. Both a searing take on coming-of-age and a vivid document of the dark face of war, Beasts of No Nation announces the arrival of an extaordinary new writer.

Our June Author: Ma Jian

A few links to help us get to know our June author, Ma Jian (The Noodle Maker). Here's a short Guardian profile and a longer reflection from the New Zealand Listener. Beat references come up a lot with this author,

References to the Beat Generation’s favourite roaming forefathers, particularly Walt Whitman, pop up constantly in Red Dust. When Ma read through the first proof of the first Chinese translation of Allen Ginsberg’s Howl in the 1980s, with its lengthy Whitmanesque breaths, he sighed then, as he does now: “Howling out loud in anguish? Now that would be heaven.

Here's a CNN piece that contrasts two generations of Chinese authors. Finally, here's a first-person reflection from the homesick exile.

Torture Awareness Month: Getting the Message Out

If the Motion Picture Association won't allow this relatively tame advertisement for a film about Guantanamo, then try to imagine walking down the street and encountering these ads from Amnesty's Swiss section!

I've just hooked us up with another Torture Awareness Month effort: Bloggers Against Torture
Check it out!

Torture Awareness Month: The Road to Guantanamo

Another post to mark Torture Awareness Month ...

Here is Amnesty International's official response to the the Guantanamo suicides and while most of my Loyal Readers signed the petition to close Guantanamo ages ago, this is the kind of action that bears repeating. For more AI perspective, Eric Sears, Director of Amnesty International USA's Denounce Torture Initiative, discussed Guantanamo on KPCC's Airtalk yesterday.

This seems as good a time as any to point out that as part of Torture Awareness Month, Amnesty is partnering with the creators of the film The Road to Guantanamo opening later this month:

The Road to Guantanamo is the terrifying first-hand account of three British citizens who were held for more than two years without charges in the American military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Known as the “Tipton Three,” in reference to their home town near Birmingham, the three were eventually returned to Britain and released—still having had no formal charges ever made against them at any time during their ordeal. The film has already engendered significant controversy due to its critical stance toward the American and British governments. Additional controversy was generated because of the cast members' detainment by British immigration authorities upon their return from the film's premiere at the Berlin film festival.

Part documentary, part dramatization, the film chronicles the sequence of events that led from the trio setting out from Tipton in the British Midlands for a wedding in Pakistan, to their crossing the Afghanistan border just as the U.S. began its bombing campaign, to their eventual capture by the Northern Alliance and their imprisonment in Camp X-Ray and later at Camp Delta in Guantanamo.

One of the "Tipton Three" was interviewed this week on NPR for his reaction to the suicides, and don't miss the article on the film's website about the censoring of the movie poster (uncensored version above) by the Motion Picture Association of America,

Thus, the MPAA's decision puts it at odds with the U.S. government, which has repeatedly defended techniques, including hooding prisoners, as not legally torture, and not inconsistent with the basic American values the MPAA tries to uphold. In a 2003 Department of Defense report, hooding was given a green light, as not inconsistent with the United States' obligations under international conventions or U.S. law. The report also approve prolonged standing, though stipulated that it "should never make the detainee exhausted to the point of weakness or collapse." And that it not be "enforced by physical restraints."

Which means that the MPAA required a change in the image that removed something not deemed torture (hooding) and focused the image on the bound hands and extended arms that clearly depicts someone forced to stand (or worse, hang) under restraint to the point of collapse, which might well be torture.

Kirby Dick, director of "This Film Is Not Yet Rated," a new film devoted to the MPAA and its ratings system, said that's not the only irony in the MPAA's decision. He compares the MPAA's secrecy to the secrecy that has governed so much of what has happened at the prison in Guantanamo and other U.S. facilities where suspects in the war on terror have been held.

"It's also interesting that the image is of someone whose vision is being blocked -- and that's the image that they're blocking," Dick said. "When you get into censorship, the irony never stops."

Time to open our eyes! The film opens in Pasadena on June 23.