IDEAS TO STIMULATE LOCAL GRASS-ROOTS ACTION
Conduct community viewing of Ghosts of Abu Ghraib, followed by discussion and suggested actions. To get a DVD for your organization or congregation, go to www.nrcat.org . Viewings will be held the week of June 25 and October 23.
Take a petition-style copy of the NRCAT statement Torture is a Moral Issue to meetings where you can invite people to sign – or put into your announcements / notices information about the statement with the website – either www.nrcat.org or www.tortureisamoralissue.org .
Amnesty International USA also has a petition circulating, The America I believe in does not torture people. Go to the website www.aiusa.org and to the issue TORTURE where there are many ideas for activities at the local level.
Contact your members of Congress. Especially powerful are visits to the staff or the Members, either in Washington, DC, or in a district office in your home state. A user-friendly website to find out all you might want to know about your members of Congress is Friends Committee on National Legislation: www.fcnl.org. Look on the web page to the left and click on Contact Congress and with the entry of your zip code you can get contact information, a list of staff members and district office addresses and key votes.
Find out more about the issues, especially about the Military Commissions Act of 2006 (MCA) and Restoring the Constitution Act of 2007 (RCA) – which reverses many of the provisions of the MCA. Go to www.fcnl.org/torture , or the Center for Constitutional Rights at www.ccr-ny.org or Human Rights First at www.humanrightsfirst.org
Attend Presidential debates and ask questions about their attitudes toward current law. One simple question might be, “Would you recommend that another country adopt a law similar to the MCA and apply that to Americans? If not, what would you change?”
Order and post a banner, Torture is Wrong. Go to www.nrcat.org/involvement_banner.aspx .
There are many excellent web sites with suggestions for local action. Here are a few web sites:
The Washington Region Religious Campaign Against Torture, www.wrrcat.org
No2Torture, www.no2torture.org
National Religious Campaign Against Torture, www.nrcat.org