Ghulamai in Bamiyan Province, Afghanistan.

When we finally stepped off the helicopter and greeted the mountains of Bamiyan, Afghanistan, I was exhausted. A full day and a half after our departure, my eyelids were heavy and I was hoping, desperately, for a cup of warm, life-giving tea and a pile of blankets to collapse into. But the group of Afghans who invited us there — not an elite assembly of men with corporate interests or a bureaucratic non-profit, but a rag-tag group of teenagers who believe in the power of nonviolence — had a different idea in mind.

We dropped off our bags in the rooms we would be staying for the next week and were led, a boy on each arm, through the winding streets of Bamiyan City after dark. Like most Afghans, the Afghan Youth Peace Volunteers live in a province that is extremely poor, with very few opportunities for paid work and little infrastructure. The city of 60,000 has no indoor plumbing and generators that provide only a few hours of dirty electricity a night — so the youth there long ago memorized the geography of the dirt roads for navigating them at night.

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Kabul, Afghanistan – After an exhausting day trekking through the dirt roads of the city of Bamiyan and outlying settlements, three Americans were guided by a dozen Afghan boys to a tent packed with overstuffed pillows and comforters. After the boys served them a delicious meal cooked over a small outdoor stove, they affixed their flashlights to the spine of the tent and invited the Americans to enter. Unlike the forts I made in my parents’ living room when I was little, this tent had a pressing message: a group of youngsters in a central province of Afghanistan want peace, not war.

The Afghan Youth Peace Volunteers, a group of ethnically diverse young men from a city one hundred miles northwest of Kabul, have been actively speaking out against the U.S- and NATO occupation for the last four years. The boys have endured grave opposition and community ridicule. However, through the help of networking sites and YouTube, this group of young men want to ask the world, “Why not love?”

“Our life is a life of the poor”, reflected the mother of one of the boys as we sat in her simple village home. With Afghanistan now being the worst country a child can be born into, alongside the challenges of building life in a country that has been fraught with thirty years of war, the very existence of this group of gentle spirits is miraculous. Many of these boys have lost one or both of their parents to infectious disease or conflict. Their city of 60,000 has no running water, little internet access, and a few hours of generated electricity a night. A barrage of cars, bicycles, donkeys, motorcycles and vans share the single-lane paved road that bisects the city – and over and over again we experienced the striking hospitality of this tense land.

The Afghan Youth Peace Volunteers have fashioned an incredible vision of hope. In their daily lives, they work very hard: many go to collect water in the morning, head to school, care for their younger siblings, tend to small shops they have opened to support their families, and travel through the rocky, mountainous roads – sometimes for more than an hour each way – to go to and from the city.

Despite rigorous daily schedules, these young men, ranging in ages from ten to twenty-two, have also found time to speak out against the policies of warmaking in their country. The tent we visited is part of a peace vigil they hold annually, this year with the words “Why Not Listen?” written in Dari on one of the flaps. The tent was put up in the Bamiyan Peace Park, a park the AYPV helped build in the center of the city. In spite of technological challenges, the group has been in contact with dozens of individuals and networks worldwide that share their deep commitment to peace. They have reached out to other youth in Afghanistan, sending gifts and messages, hoping desperately to write a new narrative for the future of the country’s young people.

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Twenty-four Witness Against Torture activists were acquitted of an Unlawful Assembly charge in D.C. Superior Court on Tuesday, June 16th.   Back in January, while twenty-eight jumpsuit-clad activists occupied the steps of the Capitol building, fourteen others broke off from a tour inside the Rotunda and performed a memorial service for three Guantánamo deaths.

Judge Canan’s courtroom was crammed with pro-se co-defendants, supporters, and legal advisors. Bill Quigley, attorney advisor and Legal Director at the Center for Constitutional Rights, poignantly orated the motion to argue the activists’ defense of international law and necessity.  Drawing on stories of mistreatment and continued detention of over one hundred men in Guantánamo, Quigley argued that no further legal recourse is available to address the injustice of U.S. policies of torture.

While Judge Canan denied the defense request, he acquitted the twenty-four outright by way of a technicality – the government wasn’t able to argue their breaching of the peace.

The anti-torture activists cheered.

However, a year and a half after Obama’s issued promise to close the detention facility, 181 men still languish there, every day fading further away from their families and lives on the outside.  Many are facing their eighth year of illegal detention.  Many more, an estimated seven hundred men, are being held by the U.S. at Bagram Air Force Base in Afghanistan.  And now, after the action, the subsequent arrest, thirty-plus hours in a D.C. Central holding cell, and almost five months of trial preparation, I can’t help but wonder what other means we have to hold the Obama Administration accountable for this immoral disaster.

Certainly we can’t stop thinking of creative, controversial strategies to confront the decision-makers.  We can’t give up on efforts to continue to educate.  Human rights groups and solidarity networks throughout the world maintain their organizing to bring awareness to these crimes.  But beyond that, I’m at a loss as to the means necessary to ensure our Muslim brothers and sisters, despite their actions, will not be rendered, tortured, and held indefinitely in my name.

Still, we must revel in our small victories. “With his decision”, said Quigley following the acquittal, “the judge validated the effort of the demonstrators to condemn the ongoing crime of indefinite detention at Guantánamo.”  Surely, this struggle continues.

In the absence of an intact corpse, families often gather for memorial services rather than funerals.

The families of Salah Ahmed Al-Salami, Mani Shaman Al-Utaybi, and Yasser Talal Al-Zahrani – three Guantánamo prisoners whose earlier purported suicides were declared “asymmetrical warfare” by the Bush Justice Administration – received Salah’s, Mani’s and Yasser’s broken and lifeless bodies. Previously the families had gathered to wake their loved ones, after authorities in their countries informed them that their sons had died in Guantánamo.

Following three grueling years of unanswered questions and heartache, Scott Horton’s recent article in Harper’s Magazine has revealed that the deaths of these three detainees may not, in fact, have been due to suicide, but to having been tortured to death in U.S. custody.

Compelled to act by this tragic news, fourteen members of the Witness Against Torture fast were arrested in the Capitol Rotunda on Thursday, January 21st for holding a memorial service in remembrance of the three men. The activists paid respect to the families of the dead in the very room where U.S. presidents are historically waked, adorning a makeshift burial shroud with handfuls of rose petals and filling the enormous Rotunda with story and song.

The Yemeni and two Saudis have stories much like many of the other men who were (and still are) indefinitely detained at Guantánamo; snatched and handed over to the United States for bounty money, 16-year-old Al-Zahrani spent the last five years of his short life in custody. Al-Utaybi, orphaned in his youth and described as “a peaceful person who would harm no one,” was intercepted after traveling to a conflict zone that straddles Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan to do humanitarian work. The U.S. Justice Department has no evidence linking Al-Salami to Al Qaeda or the Taliban. Two of them had already been cleared for release by the U.S. government; it was determined that they could not be held any longer, and they were flagged, finally, for return to their home countries.

All three were on hunger strike to challenge their illegal detention.

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