OK, I’m exhausted and delirious and it’s past midnight and it’s raining and we just finished unloading 1,650 lbs of Grade A Guantanamo cell replica on Portland’s Monument Square.
The delivery truck was a bit, ahem, late. But you know what’s amazing? There’s a guy spending the whole night alone in the cell. For real. Jeff Inglis, Managing Editor of The Portland Phoenix, donned an orange jumpsuit and will be reading “Poems From Guantanamo,” Amnesty case sheets on GTMO detainees and various and sundry other “GTLit” (you read it coined here first–GTMO Literature, a growth industry) all while listening to an iPod mix of songs (Neil Diamond, Rage Against the Machine, Christina Aguilera…) that real detainees have reportedly been subjected to for days, nonstop, as a form of sensory deprivation–known in my house as psychological torture. Did I mention Neil Diamond?
Look out for Jeff’s account of what it was like on www.thephoenix.com. For a real first hand account of indefinite detention and torture in Guantanamo and elsewhere check out former detainee Murat Kurnaz’s recent book, “Five Years of My Life.” Yeah, five. It’s incredibly powerful. I cried. Multiple times. But I was also inspired to keep up this work.
It can be draining, it can be frustrating, it can be lonely writing a lame blog post in the middle of the night that no one will read, while in an unfamiliar city, in a hotel room, one that smells like smoke because they ran out of non-smoking rooms but didn’t tell us until check-in that they were out of them–but it can also be exhilarating when people like Kurnaz are released, or when you meet other dedicated and talented people working for the same goals, like the AI volunteers in Portland I met tonight at the cell tour orientation, or when someone like Admiral Mullen, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, acknowledges that Guantanamo reflects badly on the US, or when–hopefully this month–the US Supreme Court restores habeas corpus in Boumediene v. Bush and Congress doesn’t mess it up by passing more bad legislation…OK, I’m dreaming but not getting any sleep–so goodnight. ZJ
5 June 2008 at 9:35 pm
Any plans to come to Vermont?
6 June 2008 at 6:01 pm
Not as of right now, but take a look at our current schedule for future dates. Maybe you can plan a trip to DC!
http://www.amnestyusa.org/torture/cell-tour/page.do?id=1011614&n1=3&n2=38
7 June 2008 at 4:06 am
Hi Sarah,
We sure wish we could go to Vermont, but we’ll need to raise some more funds first! Next stop is Washington DC, then hopefully to the convention cities, Crawford TX and LA…but I wish we could take it everywhere! Thanks for reading, and for your support!
9 June 2008 at 3:51 pm
Not yet. But keep checking our schedule for upcoming dates. http://www.amnestyusa.org/torture/cell-tour/page.do?id=1011614&n1=3&n2=38
Maybe you can take a trip to DC!