This article from my friend David McReynolds, was posted on the SocialistsUnmoderated mailing list.
Protest demonstrations against the US/British actions in Iraq took place around the world on March 19th. Here in New York City, I joined a group which carried cardboard coffins draped with US flags and with black flags, symbolizing Americans and Iraqis killed in this illegal war. There were about three hundred of us who gathered near the United Nations, to walk across town to the military recruiting station, in the middle of Times Square.
At the recruiting station two dozen of us sat or lay down and were arrested. One of those walking with us, but not planning to join the arrests, said she admired my courage. I said it didn’t take any courage to get arrested - the real credit goes to those who organized the demonstration, since events such as this require lots of work, including negotiations with the police over the line of march.
The arrests went smoothly. The only part of an arrest which I don’t like is the moment when the cops put your hands behind your back and bind them with plastic handcuffs. Even when the handcuffs are not too tight, it makes you feel helpless to have your hands cuffed behind you. If you tend to panic, or just want to scratch your nose, you are stuck. Some years ago at a similar arrest in Washington DC I found myself close to a panic attack, bouncing along in the back of a police van with my hands too tightly cuffed behind me. Since then, to avoid the risk of a panic attack, I always carry a Valium tablet with me and swallow it shortly before the arrest. (Ironically, this time the handcuffs were loose enough I could have slipped my hands out - but it is foolish to play games with the cops when you are under arrest. They have a tendency in such circumstances to tighten the cuffs).
The point of this article is not to rummage through the events of that day to find something significant in what happened to me. These arrests are, in a sense, choreographed, you spend a few hours in jail, you have to appear in court a month or so later - usually for a small fine. No one is going to be beaten up. Particularly if you are a 75 year old white male the cops go easy.
No, it is not anything that happened to us as we sat in jail, but rather the chance to reflect on those not so lucky as to go through such a formalized protest and arrest. I think of the hundreds of Muslims in the US who were picked up immediately after 9.11, held in jail without their families being informed, held without charges, under conditions where the handcuffs were too tight, where lawyers were not called, where the very reason for the arrests were never clear.
I think of those held in Guantanamo, or in Abu Ghraib, where, at best, they could hope - eventually, by some accident - that the International Red Cross might visit and report the horror of the conditions. I remember the photographs of the first men carried into Guantanamo, blindfolded, handcuffed. Always the Americans first blindfold or “hood” the captives. I sat in my cell without fear - no one was going to strip me, put a hood over my head, brutalize me. But the Iraqis who have been arrested - the majority of whom were later released without charges - suffered fear, pain, and in too many cases, death by torture.
The torture in which the United States and Britain have engaged has been documented beyond question, not by “left wing” sources, but by US military inspectors, by the international Red Cross, by Amnesty International. The evidence is there, it is overwhelming, and as one sits safely in a jail cell in Lower Manhattan, it is worth remembering the terror that has been inflicted on so many. What is most disturbing is that so far no charges have been brought against those at the top - such as Donald Rumsfeld. The men who made the torture possible are at the highest level, yet thus far all the legal actions have fallen on military men and women far far below them in the chain of command. As the saying goes, when a fish is bad, it stinks from the head. The US needs to do more than get out of Iraq, it needs to begin legal proceedings against those at the highest level of the US government who authorized such torture. (If the US fails to initiate such action, member states of the UN should press for UN action). The US needs to do more than close down the prisons at Guantanamo - it needs to return Guantanamo to the Cubans, as the first step in cutting back on the US military bases that now span the globe.
David McReynolds lives on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. He is the former Chair of the War Resisters International and was twice the Socialist Party’s candidate for President, in 1980 and 2000.
