June is Torture Awareness Month

You probably haven't heard about it, but this month, June, is Torture Awareness Month. It's a month during which we're all encouraged to give some attention to the global problem of torture.

This is a particularly important project for Americans, given that our own United States Congress and President worked together in 2006 to pass the Military Commissions Act, which legalizes torture. There have been a staggering number of documented cases of torture by soldiers and agents of the American government over the last several years - too many for the old excuse that the problem is due to just a "few bad apples".

Unfortunately, just as Torture Awareness Month is upon us, the web site that had been promoting it, TortureAwareness.org, has become defunct. That web site only shows a fill-in set of links not related to anti-torture activism, and a notice that the web site may be for sale.

I don't know what happened to the original Torture Awareness web site, but I can't stand to see Torture Awareness Month pass by without a web site trying to direct people to anti-torture events. So, I've started setting up my own Torture Awareness web site, at TortureAwareness.com.

If you have any suggestions for making this web site more useful, please let me know - it's a work in progress.

Also, please take a look at the organizations the new Torture Awareness web site links to, and see what you can do to get involved in their activist movement to oppose torture, wherever it occurs, around the world.

Comments: 6

J. Clifford C. Jun 11, 2007, 1:05pm EDT

No one MADE you read it.

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J. B. Jun 11, 2007, 2:35pm EDT

One of my friends from Eritrea was tortured before fleeing to the United States with his family many years ago. He has received much help from The Center for Victims of Torture (www.cvt.org) in Minnesota.

It's too bad there were so many glib comments posted to your article, as I agree - we should all recognize and reflect upon Torture Awareness Month.

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J. Clifford C. Jun 11, 2007, 7:12pm EDT

Thanks, J.B. I'm glad to hear someone else taking the issue seriously. Honestly, I look at the reaction of people like "Lex Luthor" as part of a national defense mechanism for avoiding the difficulty of what the government they've supported is really doing.

The idea that having to read an article about torture is torture is a succinct expression of how far some parts of America have descended into nationalistic denial.

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June is Torture Awareness Month

Comments: 6

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