My second day in the nation’s capital

When I was in college, I was a political science major. I truly felt that I could work within the system and help to effect long-lasting change.  I spent a semester here in a Washington semester program. I was a part-time intern in the office of Rep. Dan Marriott of Utah. He was a conservative Republican. I was not. I had to write letters to constituents on his behalf. I simply wrote the opposite of my own position. I startled myself by how persuasive I could be at disagreeing with myself.
Unfortunately, after I graduated, I could not find a job on Capitol Hill.
Despite being shut out of the system, I still believed that the system could work.
Over the years, however, I have learned otherwise. 
I met torture survivors and found out that my government had been responsible for training the military personnel who carried out the torture. I learned that my government had given these military personnel training on the most advanced weaponry that they then used on their own people.
I started becoming very disillusioned with my government.
How could this happen?
We have a constitution. We have laws. Americans helped to write all sorts of human rights legislation.
How could our government get so much out of control?
In 2002, the government that I had once believed in opened a prison for “enemy combatants” in Guantanamo. Everything about it was secret. I wondered what was going on. 
In 2003, President George W. Bush got us into a war after telling us that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. And, for the most part, Americans believed him. Even members of Congress believed him.
I was absolutely sure that President Bush was lying.
I wanted to emigrate.
I didn’t want to live in a country with a president who lied. I didn’t want to live under a government that was accused of torturing “enemy combatants” who didn’t even get the same privileges as “prisoners of war.”
I didn’t understand how our country, supposedly the best and most civilized in the world, could stoop to torture. After all, we have computers. We are technologically advanced. Therefore, we must be civilized.
Well, no.
Today, when I was standing in an orange jumpsuit and a black hood in front of the Hart Senate Office Building, I thought about these things. We have technology but it does not make us civilized. In fact, it makes us even less civilized. As an example, we can bomb people by remote control (drone bombing). Is that the action of a civilized people?
Today, I learned that three detainees at Guantanamo, who were said to have committed suicide while in detention, were placed in a secret CIA prison within Guantanamo and were allegedly tortured to death. They died, said Joe Hickman, who had been a sergeant of the guard at Guantanamo in 2006 because they were tortured to death. Rags were stuffed down their throat and they died.
I would like to think that the system would work and that these horrendous deaths will be investigated and the culprits punished appropriately.
But I am not sure that I have enough faith left in the system to believe that it will do the right thing.
So, tomorrow, I will be outside with people from Witness Against Torture and Voices for Creative Nonviolence’s Peaceable Assembly Campaign to dramatize to the government that it is time for it and for all of us to be accountable for our actions. 
I hope that someone will listen and that the names of those three men — Salah Ahmed Al-Salami, Mani Shaman Al-Utaybi, and Yasser Talal Al-Zahrani — are not forgotten. 
That is why I will be outside tomorrow, to remind those in government who still believe that the system can work to please, please… make that system work.

 

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