Two ways to act against torture

Yesterday, the National Religious Campaign Against Torture (NRCAT) -- of which the Fellowship of Reconciliation has been a participating national member since its inception two years ago -- sent out an action alert to its supporters. With the recent revelations that top Administration officials approved torture tactics of detainees, NRCAT has organized two ways for people to act concretely to oppose torture in the coming weeks.

The first action is to write letters to the editor about the revelations of the involvement of the president, vice president, and other senior White House officials in signing off on these human rights abuses. The second action is to participate in Torture Awareness Month this June by getting your local congregation or spiritual community to participate in NRCAT's Banners Across America project.

As NRCAT wrote yesterday:

We now have strong evidence that, as many of us have suspected, the abuses perpetrated on detainees over the past 7 years were not simply the acts of "rogue" agents or low ranking soldiers, but were instead planned and approved of by top Administration officials - including the President himself and Vice-President Dick Cheney. ABC News and the Associated Press recently reported that the President's top national security advisors met in the White House, on numerous occasions and with the President's approval, to authorize interrogators to torture high-value detainees (by waterboarding them and subjecting them to sleep deprivation, among other abuses). Unfortunately, these dramatic revelations have been largely ignored by the media and the public.

NRCAT has provided a method to help you press your local media outlets to address this issue by preparing a sample letter to the editor.

Thanks for joining FOR in this critical effort.