Nearly 400 people joined the War Resisters League in honoring the Center for Constitutional Rights and the Torture Abolition and Survivors Support Coalition International at the 42nd Annual WRL Peace Awards on September 28. Held at the New York Society for Ethical Culture, the program featured music by Emma’s Revolution and the Welfare Poets, readings of poetry by Ariel Dorfman and Grace Paley, a posthumous lifetime achievement award to Paley, and a gratitude award to Erica Weihs, whose calligraphy has graced the peace award scrolls for many years. Frida Berrigan, a member of WRL’s National Committee, introduced the award with these words:
“There are many jokes about lawyers…
What do you call ten lawyers at the bottom of the ocean?
A good start.
Why won’t sharks attack lawyers?
Professional courtesy.
This country loves to hate its lawyers.
But, in a time of war, who is more hated than lawyers? Those labeled ‘the worst of the worst,’ terrorist, enemy, threat, hater of our freedomes.
It was lawyers with the Center for Constitutional Rights who cracked the silence, found the names of those being held, assembled the legal teams, mounted the legal and the political battles… and began the long and laborious and still-incomplete work to advocate on behalf of men at Guantanamo and throughout the labyrinth of torture, abuse, and disappearance which the Bush administration so boldly erected (or enhanced and emboldened).
No one makes jokes about the survivors of torture. But the systematic degradation they endure is explicitly to render them less than human - a sick joke against humanity. When done in the name of the greater good, naitonal security, triumping in the clash of civilizations, winning the war against terrorism — it renders all of our ‘civilization’ laughable.
To survive torture, to assert and reclaim humanity - to work on behalf of others to restore their personhood, is to have the last laugh, is to give the blindfold eyes, to resurrect the dead.
The Torture Abolition and Survivors Support Coalition International is the only organization by survivors of torture for survivors of torture - but it is more than a support group or a center for healing. The organization and its members assert that healing is found — at least in part — in the excrutiating work of eradicating torture…
Tonight the War Resisters League honors those who take their commitment to law seriously and those for whom laughter is an act of resistance and restoration… those who stand with the victims and those who stand through their victimhood.
I could go on and on about the particular accomplishments of each organization and the gifted representatives, but time prevents me… So, if you don’t know, visit their websites, volunteer with them, etc.
This award is given in the hopes that before too long we will laugh together with those freed from Guantanamo, we will see broken bodies and broken families made whole again, and we will see justice done to those responsible.
Please join me in inviting to the stage the recipients of the War Resisters League Peace Award: Diane Ortiz for the Torture Abolition and Survivors Support Coalition International and Michael Ratner and Vincent Warren for the Center for Constitutional Rights.
As they are coming up, I will read the text of the award. But before I do that I would like to point out that its creation was a collaborative effort: the words were written by David McReynolds; then set in beautiful script by Beverly Chee Hayes; the matte was painted by watercolor genius (and mother of the award presenter) Liz McAlister.
When pain is a hated companion
When burning light is constant
When noise does not stop
When there is no sleep
When your hands go numb from cords
When you are hoarse from screaming
There are lawyers committed to justice
and survivors who have never forgotten
how to remember.
These who, being free, can speak
seeking to ease the pain, dim the lights,
silence the noise, listen to your brokenness
and end it.
In an America and a world where so many
are complicit by silence,
Where the unspeakable has become state policy
We honor those who keep the long watch,
who set at liberty those who were bound
and break the policies that break our hearts
