This is at base about whether America should be a country that pretends not to torture people, while at the same time allowing a system, called “extraordinary rendition,” that exports torture to be done elsewhere, with our CIA directing and sometimes participating.  We of NC Stop Torture Now want to lift the veil of secrecy and lies perpetrated by our government, in our names, with our tax dollars.  We want to sever the NC link in this secret, ineffective, cruel and immoral, and counter-productive process, in which innocents and others are tortured in the name of national

security.

 

I personally come to this effort through my Judeo-Christian faith and the NC Council of Churches.  The mandate of Jesus to “love one another” seems not to allow for torturing one another.  The words of the Hebrew prophet Micah to “do justice, love kindness, and walk humbly with your God,” seem to call us to name when injustice happens.  Most

religious denominations and most faiths have official words against the use of torture.  So we are called to act locally; faith demands noticing and action.

 

The Civil Disobedience Action at Aero Contractors, Inc., Smithfield Airport, April 9, 2007

 

My pastor, Rev. Greg Moore of All Saints United Methodist Church in Raleigh, picked me up early this morning so we could converge with others at St. Ann’s Roman Catholic Church in Clayton, NC, about 45 minutes down I-40 east of Raleigh.  It was a cold morning the day after Easter, in the midst of an unusual North Carolina freeze.  About 40 of us got out of our cars in the parking lot of the church, gathered ourselves and our props, and set out in a convoy down the road to the Smithfield airport, where the CIA front organization Aero Contractors is lodged in a large blue metal building.  

 

Our goal was to serve the leadership of Aero with a citizens’ arrest warrant asking Aero to cooperate with the FBI investigation into their CIA extraordinary rendition flights and also with the German indictments of three of their pilots implicated in the rendition of an innocent man to be tortured overseas.  

 

Our hope was that media would notice this concerted citizen action, even as the Aero leadership and the CIA would hide.  One more step in the uncovering of the United States’ torture machinery.  We had packets for the press with documentation of Aero’s complicity in torture.  We had bright orange (the color of the anti-torture movement) citizen indictment papers.  We had a group of several who were willing to be arrested, detained, jailed, and tried for this witness.  We had children and their parents, a local elder on her cane, photographers, life-time advocates for human rights, and two formal legal observers. 

 

Would they let us in past their gates to serve our citizens arrest papers?  Would we climb their barbed wire fence to get arrested for trespass if they did not let us in?  Would anyone pay attention?  

 

BY BARBARA ZELTER, FORMER PROGRAM ASSOCIATE, NORTH CAROLINA COUNCIL OF CHURCHES

 

(For more information, visit www.ncstoptorturenow.net)