Washington Region Religious Campaign Against Torture

Senator Carl Levin 

Senator Carl Levin (D-MI) is the ranking Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee, the ranking Democrat on the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, and serves on the Senate Intelligence Committee.  He is serving his fifth term in the U.S. Senate.  He has been a leading proponent to establish an investigative commission on U.S. torture and to support the rights of detainees.  Most recently he has issued a series of interrogatories to individuals involved in U.S. torture policy and practices to determine the extent of involvement by U.S. officials.  A regular guest on the Sunday news shows, he has been called "the Senate's wise counsel on the nation's most precipitous issues."    

Seymour Hersh is a Pulitzer Prize winning investigative journalist.  He is a regular contributor to The New Yorker on military and security matters.  His work first gained worldwide recognition in 1969 for exposing the My Lai massacre and its cover-up during the Vietnam War, for which he received the 1970 Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting.  His 2004 reports on the US military's treatment of detainees at Abu Ghraib prison gained much attention. In 2006 he reported on the US military's plans for Iran, which called for the use of nuclear weapons against that country.

Beth Pyles is a Presbyterian member of the Christian Peacemaker Teams (CPT) in Iraq.  She returned from Iraq just days before the three CPT surviving hostages were released. In December 2005 she began her assignment in Amman, Jordan, doing the press work necessitated by the kidnappings. She moved to Baghdad mid-January 2006, documenting human rights abuses of Iraqi detainees.  She also worked for CPT in Iraq September-October 2005 protecting Palestinians who had been targeted for physical abuse and random detention. Pyles practiced law for twenty-two years in Parkersburg, WV, before attending seminary in Princeton, NJ, from which she graduated in May, 2005.

Attorney Jennifer Harbury lived and worked with human rights activists, peasants and Mayan villagers in Guatemala for several years.  She is the author of Guatemala: Bridge of Courage; Searching for Everardo; and most recently, Truth, Torture and the American Way.  In the latter book, Harbury documents the U.S. path from Vietnam to Latin America to Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo. Harbury developed the anti-torture campaign, STOP (Stop Torture Permanently), for the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee last year.  She currently works with the Torture Abolition and Survivors Support Network (TASSC). 

A member of the Torture Abolition and Survivors Support Network, Mario Avilo was arrested and tortured on two different occasions in Guatemala during the "dirty wars" in Central America.

Raymond McGovern is a retired CIA officer who worked as an analyst and operations officer. He served seven U.S. presidents over 27 years and routinely presented the morning intelligence briefings at the White House.  McGovern, together with other prominent former CIA agents, founded Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity or VIPS.  The organization is dedicated to exposing what members believe to be the mishandling of important intelligence, specifically relating to the War in Iraq. McGovern recently returned his Intelligence Commendation Award medallion to Congressman Pete Hoekstra, R-MI, Chair of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, saying he did "not wish to be associated, however remotely, with an agency engaged in torture."

Elisa Massimino, Washington Director of Human Rights First (formerly the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights), is the organization's chief advocacy strategist, an expert on a range of international human rights issues and a national authority on US compliance with human rights law. She testifies frequently before Congress, writes extensively for legal and popular publications, and serves as one of the organization's primary spokespeople with the media. She is Human Rights First's point of contact with U.S. government leaders, international diplomats, and human rights opinion leaders and decision makers.  She has taught international human rights law at the University of Virginia and teaches human rights advocacy at Georgetown University.