Amnesty International Group 22 Pasadena/Caltech News
Volume XXV Number 10, October 2017
UPCOMING EVENTS
NOTE: No Monthly Meeting Oct. 26.
Thursday, November 9, 7:30 PM. Monthly
Meeting. We meet at the Caltech Y, Tyson
House, 505 S. Wilson Ave., Pasadena. (This is
just south of the corner with San Pasqual.
Signs will be posted.) We will be planning our
activities for the coming months. Please join
us! Refreshments provided.
Tuesday, November 14, 7:30-9:00 PM.
Letter writing meeting at Caltech Athenaeum,
corner of Hill and California in Pasadena. This
informal gathering is a great way for
newcomers to get acquainted with Amnesty.
Sunday, November 19, 6:30 PM. Rights
Readers Human Rights Book Discussion
Group. This month we read "Spain in our
hearts: Americans in the Spanish Civil War"
by Adam Hochschild.
COORDINATOR'S CORNER
Hola a todos!
A few things I wanted to mention: we meet in a
different room for the November 19 book
discussion group. Vroman's is doing something
in the space upstairs where we usually meet
(probably something to do with setting up the
Christmas merchandise displays or maybe
they're having a book signing!), so we are
meeting in the Atrium. I know we met in the
Atrium once before, but I can't remember where
it is! Anyway, Stevi will get the key from the
information desk downstairs and open up the
room. Those of us who usually arrive a little
late (referring to Rob and myself) can get
directions from the info desk.
I'm looking forward to reading the November
book selection, as we subscribe to the New
Yorker magazine and I have read several articles
by Hochschild.
Group 22 members Wen and Stevi tabled at the
Caltech Y Community Service and Advocacy
Fair on Oct. 18. See pic in this newsletter.
Ideas for our next food outing? Moroccan food
was suggested at the October book discussion --
what do you all think?
Con Carino,
Kathy
Next Rights Readers Meeting
Sunday, November 19
6:30 PM
Vroman's Bookstore
695 E Colorado Blvd.
Pasadena
Spain in Our Hearts: Americans in the
Spanish Civil War
by Adam Hochschild
BOOK REVIEW
'Spain in Our Hearts' tells the American story
of the Spanish civil war
By Bob Drogin, contact reporter
March 25, 2016, Los Angeles Times
The Spanish civil war, which ran from 1936 to
1939, is most notable to historians for how it
foreshadowed the horrors of World War II.
Yet few distant conflicts are so burned into our
culture and consciousness.
Ernest Hemingway, who covered the war, made
it the setting of "For Whom the Bell Tolls," "the
best goddamn book" he ever wrote. George
Orwell, who fought in it, called his popular
memoir "Homage to Catalonia." Pablo Picasso's
"Guernica," perhaps his most famous painting,
captures the agony of that city being bombed to
rubble. Robert Capa's "The Falling Soldier" is
iconic combat photography. Visitors to the front
included singer Paul Robeson, poet Langston
Hughes and film star Errol Flynn.
Less well known are the 2,800 American men
and women who defied U.S. policy and risked
their lives to defend Spain's democratically
elected government. Avowedly leftist, these
Republican fighters received antiquated
weapons and other supplies from Soviet dictator
Joseph Stalin.
Outnumbered and outgunned, they were
defeated by Nationalist insurgents led by right
wing Gen. Francisco Franco. He was reinforced
by modern tanks, fighter planes and troops from
Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, who used Spain
to test weapons and tactics that soon would
devastate Europe.
Battling isolationists at home, President Franklin
D. Roosevelt carefully kept America neutral. But
his refusal to allow arms sales to the embattled
Republicans helped seal their fate.
Teruel, the coldest battle of the war.
(Tamiment Library, New York University)
The tragic story of the Americans in the doomed
Lincoln Brigade -- who bore some of the
toughest fighting and heaviest casualties of any
unit -- comes vividly to life in Adam
Hochschild's compelling "Spain in Our Hearts,"
a long-overdue book that explores this long-
overlooked conflict.
Hochschild cautions he hasn't written a history
of the war or even of the Lincoln Brigade. He
instead focuses on a handful of Americans to tell
the larger story of why Spain loomed so large at
the time.
Mining letters, unpublished memoirs and other
archives, Hochschild recounts how Americans
like Bob and Marion Merriman, graduate
students from Berkeley, were drawn to what
they considered a utopian society and what they
rightly saw as the opening round in a global
battle against fascism.
Tall and taciturn, Merriman was a rare
volunteer with military training and he rose to
help lead the Lincolns, as they were known, in
combat. Hemingway supposedly used him as a
model for Robert Jordan, the American hero in
his novel.
Merriman disappeared in April 1938 during a
chaotic Republican retreat. Reports suggest he
was captured and executed by Nationalists. He
was one of about 800 Americans who died in
Spain.
Like most of them, the Merrimans were
communists, an ideology that lured many
Americans in the turmoil of the Depression. If
their politics have failed the test of time,
the actions of the Lincolns - and an estimated
35,000 other foreign fighters - have endured.
They went to war against Hitler while Europe's
leaders sought to appease him.
"There seemed a moral clarity about the crisis in
Spain," Hochschild writes. "Rapidly advancing
fascism cried out for defiance; if not here,
where?"
(The last surviving Lincoln, Delmer Berg, died
last month in Columbia, Calif., age 100. He
remained an "unreconstructed Communist" all
his life, according to his obituary.)
Many Lincolns shared idealism verging on
naivete. Once they had hiked across the snowy
Pyrenees from France, they often marched to
war without uniforms, maps or modern
weapons.
Lois Orr, who went to Republican-held
Barcelona from Kentucky with her husband,
Charles, in 1936, exulted in a letter home that
she was "living the revolution" in a workers'
paradise where "anything was possible, a new
heaven and a new earth were being formed."
Yet she didn't speak Spanish, barely
acknowledged the privations around her, and
was given a luxurious apartment, confiscated
from the German consul, that most Spaniards
could never hope to attain.
The Americans came from nearly every state
and all walks of life: professors and union
organizers, coal miners and a former governor
of Ohio. About 90 were African American.
About a third came from New York. Close to
half were Jewish.
For us it wasn't Franco," wrote one veteran. "It
was always Hitler."
What to make of the era's Republicans? They
opened all the prisons in the areas they
controlled, releasing violent criminals as well as
political prisoners.
Hochschild, thankfully, recounts a leader who
died in the battle for Madrid after "murmuring
the anarchist lament, 'Too many committees!'"
Some Americans had their passports seized
when they got home or were targeted in the
anti-communist witch hunts of the 1950s despite
fighting honorably in World War II. Some
played key roles in the civil rights and anti-war
movements of the 1960s.
The heartbreak is what lingers longest in "Spain
in Our Hearts."
The title comes from Albert Camus. Men
learned in Spain, the French novelist wrote
sadly, that "one can be right and yet be beaten,
that force can vanquish spirit, and that there are
times when courage is not rewarded."
(http://www.latimes.com/books/la-ca-jc-spain-in-
our-hearts-20160327-story.html)
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Hochschild was born in New York City. As a
college student, he spent a summer working on
an anti-government newspaper in South Africa
and subsequently worked briefly as a civil rights
worker in Mississippi in 1964. Both were
politically pivotal experiences about which he
would later write in his book Finding the
Trapdoor. He later was part of the movement
against the Vietnam War, and, after several
years as a daily newspaper reporter, worked as
a writer and editor for the leftwing Ramparts
magazine. In the mid-1970s, he was one of the
co-founders of Mother Jones.
Hochschild's first book was a memoir, Half the
Way Home: a Memoir of Father and Son (1986),
in which he described the difficult relationship
he had with his father. His later books include
The Mirror at Midnight: a South African Journey
(1990; new edition, 2007), The Unquiet Ghost:
Russians Remember Stalin (1994; new edition,
2003), Finding the Trapdoor: Essays, Portraits,
Travels (1997), which collects his personal essays
and reportage, and King Leopold's Ghost: A
Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial
Africa (1998; new edition, 2006), a history of the
conquest and colonization of the Congo by
Belgium's King Lopold II. His Bury the Chains:
Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an
Empire's Slaves, published in 2005, is about the
antislavery movement in the British Empire.
Hochschild has also written for The New
Yorker, Harper's Magazine, The New York
Review of Books, The New York Times
Magazine, and The Nation. He was also a
commentator on National Public Radio's All
Things Considered. Hochschild's books have
been translated into twelve languages.
A frequent lecturer at Harvard's annual Nieman
Narrative Journalism Conference and similar
venues, Hochschild lives in San Francisco and
teaches writing at the Graduate School of
Journalism at the University of California,
Berkeley. He is married to sociologist Arlie
Russell Hochschild.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adam_Hochschild
SECURITY WITH HUMAN
RIGHTS
By Robert Adams
UN: Amnesty Urges International Action on
Armed Drones
AIUSA press release issued October 20, 2017
On October 20 Amnesty International will
launch a new briefing at the UN General
Assembly, setting out measures to bring the use
and transfer of armed drones in line with
international human rights and humanitarian
law.
The briefing, Key principles on the use and transfer
of armed drones, has been developed in response
to the rapid proliferation of armed drones, and
their use in extrajudicial executions and other
unlawful killings around the world.
"The past few years have seen an alarming
growth in the use of armed drones by states
including the USA and the UK, yet the
circumstances in which they are deployed
remain shrouded in secrecy," said Rasha Abdul
Rahim, Arms Control Campaigner at Amnesty
International.
"What we do know is that their use has created
a situation in which the whole world can be
treated as a battlefield, and virtually anyone can
count as collateral damage. Armed drones have
been used to carry out unlawful killings with
minimal oversight and accountability, and with
devastating consequences for civilians in
countries like Yemen and Afghanistan.
"We are calling on all states to bring their use of
armed drones in line with international human
rights and humanitarian law - unlawful use
must not become the norm."
The principles outlined in Amnesty
International's briefing provide a basis on which
UN member states can develop binding policies
that will ensure accountability, protect the right
to life and prevent future violations and abuses.
Amnesty International is calling on all UN
member states to:
„ Ensure that their use of armed drones
complies with international law, including
international human rights law
„ Publicly disclose the legal and policy
standards and criteria they apply to the use of
armed drones
„ Ensure effective investigations into all
cases where there are reasonable grounds to
believe that drone strikes have resulted in
unlawful killings and/or any civilian casualties
„ Establish rigorous controls on transfers of
armed drones, and on assistance to operations of
other states using armed drones
„ Enable meaningful oversight and
remedies
The launch of the briefing will take place at a
side event of the UN General Assembly First
Committee, hosted by PAX and the UN Institute
for Disarmament Research (UNIDIR) on Friday,
October 20.
It will take place between 1:15 - 2:30 in
Conference Room 7 at the United Nations in
New York.
DEATH PENALTY NEWS
By Stevi Carroll
UN and the Death Penalty
September 29, 2017, the United Nations Human
Rights Council voted on a resolution, "The
Question of the Death Penalty." Within the text,
it says, "Taking note of the reports of the
Secretary General on the question of the death
penalty, in the latest of which the Secretary
General examined the disproportionate impact
of the use of the death penalty on poor or
economically vulnerable individuals, foreign
nationals, individuals exercising the rights to
freedom of religion or belief and freedom of
expression, and the discriminatory use of the
death penalty against persons belonging to
racial and ethnic minorities, its discriminatory
use based on gender or sexual orientation, and
its use against individuals with mental or
intellectual disabilities,". (for the entire text, go
to http://undocs.org/A/HRC/36/L.6).
Thirteen countries voted against the resolution.
Those countries included Botswana, Burundi,
Egypt, Ethiopia, Bangladesh, China, India, Iraq,
Japan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, United Arab
Emirates, and the United States. Ty Cobb,
director of the Human Rights Campaign Global
said he believes the Trump administration
showed a "blatant disregard for human rights and
LGBTQ lives around the world" because for the
first time 'sexual orientation' was in the
resolution's language.
In response to criticism, a US State Department
spokesperson, Heather Nauert, said that the US's
position on the resolution was misleading
because the US "unequivocally condemns" the
use of the death penalty for homosexuality,
adultery, and religious offenses. However, the
US's problem with the resolution was that it was
seen as calling for the abolition of the death
penalty altogether. Ms Nauert said, "We had
hoped for a balanced and inclusive resolution
that would better reflect the positions of states
that continue to apply the death penalty lawfully,
as the United States does." The UN resolution
calls upon all states who continue to use the
death penalty to consider abolishing it; it does
not say they must. The US has always voted
against or abstained from voting on resolutions
regarding the death penalty.
In the US, 31 states continue to use (or have at
their disposal) the death penalty (including
California). In the world, the US is in the top 10
countries to employ executions.
"Did our family want justice or did we want
revenge?"
Cynthia Statemen's father was murdered by a
19-year-old man. As her family grappled with
how they felt about the upcoming trial of this
young man named David, they struggled with
this question: "Did our family want justice or
did we want revenge?"
Ms Statemen and her family decided to meet
David and the District Attorney. Instead of
asking for the death penalty, the family and DA
agreed to an in-prison education program that
included training for a trade and reading books
to broader his knowledge about the world and
people. David also was allowed to come to the
father's funeral where he asked to speak. He
said, "A good man is dead because of what I
did. I'm sorry." He gestured to the family
members and said, "They spared my life. I
didn't deserve that. I'm going to be in prison for
a very long time, but I'm not being sent there to
die. What I want to ask all of you here is: Is there
any way you can forgive me?" This was at a
church service that ended with the entire
congregation laying their hands of forgiveness
on David while singing "Amazing Grace."
The family found the answer to their question:
"Did our family want justice or did we want
revenge?"
This, I believe, is a question I, and perhaps all of
us, wrestle with.
Pope Francis recently wrote a letter to the
President of the International Commission
Against the Death Penalty. In that letter, he
stated that he believes that the death penalty
"does not render justice to the victims, but rather
fosters vengeance."
Today when you read about the recent
executions, pay attention to how many years
have passed since these men were sentenced to
death. Think about who you were that many
years ago and if you are the same person now
that you were then. I know that part of the reason
the recent California initiative passed to lessen
the time from trial to execution to five years is so
that these vast amounts of time will not pass
before the State can kill people. Then please look
at the people who were recently exonerated and
how many years passed.
Do we want justice or do we want revenge? And
if we want justice, what would true justice look
like?
Recent Exonerations
Lamar Johnson
State: MD Date of Exoneration: 9/19/2017
In 2005, Lamar Johnson was sentenced to life in
prison for murder in Baltimore, Maryland. He
was exonerated in 2017 after witnesses
identified the real gunman.
John Horton
State: IL Date of Exoneration: 10/4/2017
In 1995, John Horton was sentenced to life in
prison without parole for a murder and robbery
in Rockford, Illinois that took place when he was
17. He was exonerated in 2017 based on
evidence that his cousin committed the crime,
and because the prosecution concealed evidence
that discredited one of its witnesses.
Lamonte McIntyre
State: KS Date of Exoneration: 10/13/2017
In 1994, Lamonte McIntyre was sentenced to life
in prison for a double murder in Kansas City,
Kansas that occurred when he was 17. He was
exonerated in 2017 after several witnesses
identified the real killer, and new evidence
showed that the prosecution had concealed
statements from witnesses that he was not the
gunman.
Stays of Executions
September
26 Keith Tharpe GA
(Stay granted by the U.S. Supreme Court
on September 26, 2017 "pending the disposition
of [Tharpe's] petition for a writ of certiorari"
seeking review of a decision by the 11th Circuit
denying him an appeal of his habeas corpus
claim that his death sentence was
unconstitutionally tainted by the participation of
a racially biased juror.)
October
5 Jeffrey Borden AL
18 Melvin Bonnell OH
(Rescheduled for April 11, 2018)
18 William Montgomery OH
(Rescheduled for January 3, 2018)
18 Raymond Tibbetts OH
(Rescheduled for February 13, 2018)
19 Torrey McNabb AL
(executed)
26 Clifton Lee Young TX
Executions
October
5 Cary Michael Lambrix FL
Lethal injection 3-drug (etomidate)
33 years from sentencing to execution
12 Robert Pruett TX
Lethal injection 1-drug (Pentobarbital)
15 years from sentencing to execution
19 Torrey McNabb AL
Lethal injection1-drug (Pentobarbital)
19 years from sentencing to execution
Group 22 Participates in
Caltech Fair
Thanks to Wen Chen and Stevi Carroll for
tabling at the Caltech Y Community Service and
Advocacy Fair on October 18. They obtained 17
new signups for the Group 22 mailing list, plus
15 signatures on the Narges Mohammadi
petition and 12 on the Gao Zhisheng petition.
Stevi said they had a great time.
A special welcome to those who signed up at the
Fair and are receiving this newsletter for the first
time! Thank you for your interest in human
rights, and we would be very happy to see you
at one of our Group 22 events.
Former Prisoner of Conscience
Gao Zhisheng Detained Again!
By Joyce Wolf
Amnesty published an Urgent Action for Gao
Zhisheng, an activist and respected human
rights lawyer. His family reported him missing
on August 13, and he is now said to be in police
custody in Beijing.
Gao Zhisheng was Group 22's adopted Prisoner
of Conscience from 2010 to 2015. During this
time he was subject to forced disappearance and
repeated torture, and he served three years in
prison. We are very distressed to learn that he
has been detained again and that the authorities
refuse to disclose his exact location and
condition.
You can find the Urgent Action for Gao
Zhisheng (UA 212.17) at
https://www.amnestyusa.org/urgent-
actions/urgent-action-former-prisoner-of-
conscience-detained-again-china-ua-212-17/
GROUP 22 OCTOBER LETTER COUNT
UA for Gao Zhisheng 14
Other UAs 29
Total 43
Amnesty International Group 22
The Caltech Y
Mail Code C1-128
Pasadena, CA 91125
www.its.caltech.edu/~aigp22/
http://rightsreaders.blogspot.com
Amnesty International's mission is to undertake research and action focused on
preventing and ending grave abuses of the rights to physical and mental integrity,
freedom of conscience and expression, and freedom from discrimination, within the
context of its work to promote all human rights.