Guantanamo at Home: An Evening with the Families of US Terror Suspects
Friday, October 14 · 7:00pm - 9:30pm
Proshansky Auditorium, City University of New York Graduate Center
365 Fifth Avenue (at 34th Street), New York, NY
GUANTÁNAMO AT HOME: Gareth Peirce, Gbenga Akinnagbe, Kathleen Chalfant, Wallace Shawn, and Deborah Eisenberg host an evening focused on the human rights crisis in the US federal justice system with firsthand accounts from the families of US terror suspects.
As the tenth anniversary of September 11th is commemorated across the country, most public attention to the civil liberties and human rights abuses of the US "War on Terror" still focuses overseas—to the abuses at Guantánamo, Bagram, and CIA rendition sites.
Renowned human rights lawyer Gareth Peirce, along with stage and screen actors Gbenga Akinnagbe, Wallace Shawn, and Kathleen Chalfant, and 2011 PEN/Faulkner Award winner Deborah Eisenberg will co-host an evening focused on the stories of families whose loved ones are suffering rights abuses in terrorism cases being prosecuted within the American federal judicial system.
Family members will tell their own stories of the human and civil rights violations here in US courts and prisons—stories of the inhumane conditions of confinement terror suspects face pre-trial and post-conviction; of over-reaching material support charges often accompanied by flimsy evidence; of years of intrusive and often illegal government surveillance; of FBI informants disrupting mosques and instigating conspiracies.
Featured speakers will include family members of the Newburgh Four, Fahad Hashmi, Lynne Stewart, the Holy Land Five, Tarek Mehanna, the Fort Dix Five, Ahmed Abu-Ali, and Shifa Sadequee among others.
Co-sponsored by The Center for Constitutional Rights; The Center for Place, Culture and Politics, The Graduate Center, CUNY; The Center for Humanities, The Graduate Center, CUNY; Theaters Against War; and Educators for Civil Liberties, with support from The North Star Fund.
For more information, contact Sally Eberhardt at sallyeb@earthlink.net.