Washington State Religious Campaign Against Torture presentsRay McGovern on "Why Accountability for Torture Is Crucial for Human Rights, Our Security and Our Souls"
Thursday November 12, 2009, 7:00 p.m., at Kane Hall, Room 220, University of Washington Campus, Seattle
Ray McGovern was a CIA analyst for 27 years. He is active in Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) and has been an outspoken critic of the flawed intelligence used to justify the Iraq war and of the use of torture. He has written:
On April 16, President Barack Obama released ... documents [which] reveal that top CIA officials solicited and obtained from handpicked Department of Justice lawyers legal opinions based on an extraordinary premise; namely, that so-called "enhanced interrogation techniques" did not amount to torture unless they caused "pain equivalent to organ failure or death." With that very high threshold, the CIA was given free rein to use harsh techniques like waterboarding and sleep deprivation, to name just two of the torture techniques that find antecedents in the Spanish Inquisition. Several detainees died in CIA custody; the murders appear to qualify as capital offenses under 18 U.S.C. 2441, the War Crimes Act passed into law in 1996 by a Republican-controlled Congress.
Co-sponsors include ACLU-Washington; American Friends Service Committee - Pacific NW; Amnesty International Group 4, Seattle; Amnesty International Puget Sound; Backbone Campaign; Sound Nonviolent Opponents of War (SNOW); UW Amnesty International; UW Center for Global Studies; UW Center for Human Rights; UW Jackson School of International Studies; UW Latin American Studies Program; UW Law, Societies & Justice program; UW Southeast Asia Center; United Nations Association Greater Seattle Chapter; Washington Association of Churches; and Western Washington Fellowship of Reconciliation.
Information http://www.wsrcat.org
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