Saturday, March 24, 2012

The Outer Limits of Solitary Confinement: A Public Forum to Support the California Prisoner Hunger Strike

Release Date: March 24, 2012  
Contact: Marina Drummer
International Coalition to Free the Angola Three
Marina@communityfuturescollective.org
(707) 486-6806
www.angola3.org
www.angola3news.com

The Outer Limits of Solitary Confinement:
A Public Forum to Support the California Prisoner Hunger Strike

Friday, April 6, 2012, 6pm - 8pm
UC Hastings College of the Law
Louis B. Mayer Lounge
198 McAllister Street
San Francisco

(San Francisco)  --This free San Francisco event organized by the International Coalition to Free the Angola 3 will mark 40 years of solitary confinement for Herman Wallace and Albert Woodfox of the Angola 3, by exploring the expansion and overuse of solitary confinement, and mobilizing support for the Amnesty International Petition to remove them from solitary confinement and support for the California Hunger Strikers. Includes Keynote with Angola 3’s Robert H. King, 2 films and additional speakers.

Wednesday, March 14, 2012

Guantanamo Prison's True Secret: Jason Leopold in Conversation With Andy Worthington


Guantanamo Prison's True Secret: Jason Leopold in Conversation With Andy Worthington

By Angola 3 News for Truthout.org

http://www.indybay.org/uploads/2012/03/14/book.jpg

British journalist Andy Worthington, the author of “The Guantanamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison,” has been documenting the array of human rights abuses at Guantanamo for over six years now, after he personally became angry that the US government would not say who they were holding at Guantanamo. Worthington was recently a guest speaker alongside investigative journalist Jason Leopold at the UC Hastings College of Law, in San Francisco on January 13, 2012, hosted by the college’s chapter of the National Lawyers Guild. The event, entitled “Ten Years of Guantanamo,” was held amidst protests around the world calling for the prison to be immediately shut.

Leopold, who has also written extensively about Guantanamo for Truthout, queried Worthington about a range of issues surrounding Guantanamo and the so-called “war on terror.” While exchanging stories of false imprisonment and torture, both journalists expressed a profound moral outrage, openly supporting a global coalition of human rights activists’ call to shut the prison down, and, at a minimum, to release prisoners already cleared for release. Most of the conversation examined the reasons why the prison has not yet been closed, and then how, with these reasons in mind, activists can best strategize their organizing tactics for targeting lawmakers and building public support for closure.

While strategizing about ways to gain public support for shutting Guantanamo down, both Leopold and Worthington converged on the need to expose the extreme fearmongering perpetrated by US leadership in order to justify the human rights nightmare created by the war on terror. Looking specifically at the rhetorical strategies used to advocate for the recently passed National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), Worthington commented that elected officials are either “scared and [therefore are] disgraceful cowards or they’re scaremongers, and I think most of them are scaremongers. They’re playing the fear card. It’s an insult to you … we face such grave economic problems at the moment, that to have these idiots obsessing only about a terrorism threat that they conjured up, is a disgrace.”