Members of the Quaker Initiative to End Torture (QUIT) laid down the group on July 15, after more than 19 years. Participants’ age and fatigue as well as the public’s emotional difficulty with contemplating torture are reasons the group disbanded, according to founding member John Calvi.
“Torture is one of the most unattractive topics,” Calvi said.
The nonprofit organization’s outreach included offering conferences to educate about U.S.-sponsored torture and updating followers on social media. QUIT advised concerned citizens to join anti-torture demonstrations, urge media outlets to report on the issue, write to the president and Congress, support a UN Convention opposing enforced disappearances, and urge political candidates to publicly disclose their stances on torture, according to the group’s website. The group’s Facebook page and website will remain online, but donations are no longer being accepted.
Friends Journal talked with founder Calvi and fellow member Chuck Fager about what led them to work with QUIT and what sustained them during nearly 20 years of work against torture.
In 2005, Calvi read an op-ed in The New York Times by the sociologist Arlie Hochschild about children being imprisoned and tortured in Iraq, Afghanistan, and the U.S.-run military prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
“That upset me deeply,” Calvi said.
Calvi contacted other Quakers, including Joe Franko, who was then directing the Pacific Southwest Regional Office of American Friends Service Committee (AFSC); Chuck Fager, then director of Quaker House in Fayetteville, N.C.; Liz Keeney, a knowledgeable Friend; and Scilla Wahrhaftig, then program director for AFSC’s Pennsylvania Office. He found that these Friends shared his interest and commitment to forming a working group.
Older Quaker women from the World War II era were some of the first members of QUIT, Calvi noted. Young people who were surprised that the United States was endorsing torture also joined, according to Calvi. The group established a listserv and a website. Monthly and yearly meetings across the country adopted minutes of support.
In 2006, the group held its first conference with 126 participants representing 18 yearly meetings from four countries. The gathering at Guilford College in Greensboro, N.C., featured a speech by international human rights lawyer and author Jennifer Harbury. Harbury was married to Mayan Guatemalan EfraĂn Bámaca Velásquez, who was murdered after being tortured following his capture in 1992 in a battle in Guatemala. She sued CIA director John M. Deutch, stating that the agency contributed to her husband’s torture and death.
At the last QUIT conference in 2010, 36 people attended, Calvi observed.
QUIT convened four conferences, offered presentations at yearly, quarterly, and monthly meetings in the United States, and gave the keynote address at the Friends General Conference Gathering in 2011, according to a press release announcing the group’s end.
Calvi taught about U.S. involvement in torture whenever he traveled the country to educate about his healing work.He began his work as a Quaker healer who served rape survivors. Calvi considers rape the oldest form of torture. He also worked with patients with AIDS during the height of that epidemic. Calvi sustained himself in his work by getting a lot of sleep, meditating, surrendering to Spirit, spending time in solitude, and practicing proper nutrition.
While living in Washington, D.C., from 1988 to 1990, he offered massage therapy and laying on of hands to refugees who had survived torture. Many of the people he helped were from El Salvador.
“For me it was this lovely change from helping people to die to helping people to live,” said Calvi, who is a member of Putney (Vt.) Meeting.
QUIT member Chuck Fager also began working against torture as part of related employment.
From 2002 to 2012, Fager worked as the director of Quaker House in Fayetteville, N.C. Quaker House offered counseling to soldiers stationed at Fort Bragg (now called Fort Liberty) who opposed war as “organized mass murder.” Fager’s father was a World War II bomber pilot and Fager grew up on military bases. He was raised as a conservative Catholic and planned to go to the U.S. Air Force Academy in El Paso County, Colo. In addition to meeting the application requirements, candidates for the academy had to be chosen by a congressional representative. Fager’s congressperson chose him as an alternate. The congressperson’s first-choice candidate went to the academy. Fager went to Colorado State University instead and joined the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps. Some time after, he quit ROTC, got involved in the Civil Rights Movement, and opposed the Vietnam War.
He grew to see war as immoral which undercut his belief in the morality of U.S. involvement in the world. He became a Quaker after encountering Friends through the process of applying to be a conscientious objector. In 1969, he joined Friends Meeting at Cambridge (Mass.). He has been a member of Spring Meeting in Snow Camp, N.C., since 2016.
As director of Quaker House, Fager made a point of being ready to respond to unexpected concerns.
In 2004, Fager heard in the news that U.S. troops had been torturing people in Abu Ghraib, a U.S.-run military prison near Baghdad, Iraq. A U.S. soldier in Baghdad leaked information about torturers and took photos of torture victims.
Fager had not previously been thinking about torture but saw a connection to Fort Bragg. Soldiers from Fort Bragg who had worked in Iraq alleged that U.S. troops tortured detainees there. Fager came to see addressing torture as part of his work at Quaker House.
Although torture is a crime under U.S. and international law, the Office of Legal Counsel advised the George W. Bush administration to describe the CIA’s torture of terror suspects as “enhanced interrogation,” Fager explained.
“It created a state of impunity,” Fager said.
Some torturers at Abu Ghraib were court-martialed, but many perpetrators and officials who gave the orders to commit human rights abuses were not prosecuted, Fager explained.
Torture victims should not be outside the protection of the law, according to Fager. If an official can torture someone with impunity, that official is above the law, Fager explained. Placing some individuals outside the protection of the law and others above the law are two indications of a totalitarian society, according to Fager.
The regional airport in Johnston County had planes operated by Aero Contractors that flew terror suspects to sites abroad where they were tortured, Fager explained. Friends Journal’s phone calls seeking comment from Aero Contractors went unanswered. Fager was part of an effort by North Carolina Stop Torture that organized volunteers to pick up trash along the highway outside the airport. In exchange for clearing the litter at least four times a year, the group was allowed to post a sign with its name, as part of the Adopt-a-Highway program.
Fager explained that QUIT did not achieve its goal of holding the officials who ordered torture legally accountable. A few low ranking soldiers who took photos of torture victims went to jail but most perpetrators did not face legal consequences, Fager noted.
“QUIT was a noble effort. It was good work, but it was a failure,” Fager said.
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