Report by Ciaron O'Reilly
Last week, we made our way to the book launch of ``Dirty Wars - the world is a battlefield" by former New York Catholic Worker now celebrated investigatory journalist Jeremy Scahill. Jeremy gave an excellent speech naming Guantanamo as the most visible point of a massive iceberg of a U.S. policy of torture and assassination. So if Obama closes Guantanamo and escalates his assassination program while maintaining other black site torture chambers we will know our work is far from over.
So I bought the book, joined the queue, got my snap and have started churning through this well documented tome. I highly recommend getting your hands on this one if you want to be brought up to speed on the nature of how the empire is waging wars these daze. A documentary accompanies the book and it just won an award at the Sundance Festival. Check out the trailer.
On Friday, some folks from the London Catholic Worker and Veterans for Peace joined hundreds internationally on the day long solidarity fast marking the 100th. day of the ongoing hunger strike by Guantanamo prisoners. One of the driving U.S. campaign groups, Witness Against Torture, was set up from the Catholic Worker pilgrimage walking through Cuba to Guanatanamo Bay several years ago. This grouping has done much to keep Guantanamo on the radar, in the courts with civil disobedience and visible on the streets of the U.S.A.
The solidarity demonstration at the U.S. embassy in London coincided with the annual European Catholic Worker gathering, so 20 Catholic Workers drove up to London from our base in Kent. We included Catholic Workers from Australia, England, Germany Scotland, Sweden and The Netherlands. More pics of the solidarity demonstration outside U.S. embassy in London.