Weaving a net of accountability

Dear Blue NC:

A highly innovative North Carolina project is creating accountability for our state’s role in the Bush Administration’s cruel experiment with “disappearance” and torture. We are asking for your help to make this project succeed.

Sadly, it has become clear that the Obama Administration cannot or will not call to account those who designed and executed what Vice President Cheney called our “walk on the dark side.”

As you probably know, this experiment involved direct torture by U.S. personnel, disappearance and indefinite secret detention, and the transfer of dozens of prisoners to foreign custody for “torture by proxy.” Without a transparent investigation and some form of accountability, we must all fear that the experiment will sooner or later be repeated.

But new hope has arisen that some form of genuine accountability can be created from below. A team of attorneys and human rights organizers has come together to create “Weaving a Net of Accountability.”

“Weaving a Net” is based on the idea that accountability happens through actions all over the world, large and small, that reinforce each other. To take action, North Carolinians need to know about the “torture taxis” based at the Johnston County Airport and the state-funded Global TransPark in Kinston. And with that knowledge comes a simple obligation: neither citizens nor elected officials can be passive bystanders in the face of what we all surely recognize is wrong.

The first step is a major conference to be held April 8-10, 2010, at Duke University. The keynote speaker will be Scott Horton, Contributing Editor of Harper's Magazine, expert on international law and extraordinary rendition. Other speakers include:

• Gavin Simpson, lead investigator with Senator Dick Marty in the groundbreaking research of the Council of Europe, human rights arm of the European Union, which uncovered a wealth of detail about the global spider web of disappearances, secret flights, and underground CIA prisons. Mr. Simpson is also an expert on truth commissions.
• Stephen Soldz, Director of the Center for Research, Evaluation, and Program Development at the Boston Graduate School of Psychoanalysis. Dr. Soldz is a co-founder of the Coalition for an Ethical Psychology, which has made international news with its campaign to challenge the participation of psychologists in interrogation and torture.

The conference will invite participants from abroad and from our state to consider key questions, such as

“What is the responsibility of state and local governments when faced with the misuse of their public facilities for activities that violate national and international law?”

“How do we break through public and official denial and get our elected officials to demonstrate the moral courage necessary to exercise their duties?”

Out of the conference will emerge an ongoing Citizens’ Commission of Inquiry, composed of respected figures from law, ethics, and public life. The Commission will create a formal record of our state’s sordid involvement in extraordinary rendition. And it will put together a set of recommendations for state and local officials. These recommendations will help guide them through the difficult terrain created by secret federal policies that have violated both law and basic human decency.

We expect this bold experiment will make news and reach the hearts and minds of both our fellow North Carolinians and those well beyond our borders. We even expect it can help create a national climate in which Americans’ deep wish for a just closure to the “walk on the dark side” can finally begin to become reality.

Your help is critical. To date, we have raised pledges of about $18,000 toward total expenses for the April 2010 conference of about $35,000. Can you support this grassroots initiative for truth and justice? Please visit our website to make a donation. http://accountabilityfortorturenc.org/index.html

“If the people lead, the leaders will follow.”

Thanks in advance for your help!

Best wishes,

John Heuer,
NC Peace Action

919-444-3823