Please Tweet for Torture Awareness

June: best known for school ending, kids’ going to camp, longer days, and increasing temperatures. Also known for being Torture Awareness Month. And, tomorrow, June 26, is International Day in Support of Victims of Torture (as declared by the U.N. in 1997).

We at the ACLU promote torture awareness all year long, but tomorrow, we’re joining the National Religious Campaign Against Torture, Amnesty International, Witness Against Torture, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, and many other groups in a Tweet-in Day Against Torture. We’ll be tweeting @No_More_Torture and using the hashtags #June26, #NoTorture, #StopTorture, #Torture, #Guantanamo, and #NDAA, and we hope you will tweet tomorrow as well.

The Tweet-in Day is the perfect opportunity to remind Congress once again to fix the problems created by last year’s National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) by repealing the mandatory military detention requirement and banning indefinite detention.

It’s also a great time to tell Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein and the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI) to publicly release their report on the CIA’s torture program. Feinstein has already indicated the importance of the investigation’s findings. In December, she stated “I can assure the Senate and the Nation that coercive and abusive treatment of detainees in U.S. custody was far more systematic and widespread than we thought,” and in April she issued a statement with Sen. Carl Levin asserting that the committee’s final report “will provide a detailed, factual description of how interrogation techniques were used, the conditions under which detainees were held, and the intelligence that was – or wasn’t – gained from the program.” Those findings should not collect dust on a congressional shelf. We should know the extent of abuses authorized by our government and how those abuses affected our security.

We’ve included a couple of sample tweets below, and we encourage you to make up your own (and re-tweet ours) as well:

· .@SenFeinstein Please publicly release SSCI #Torture Report. The public has the right to know about abuse in our name. @No_More_Torture

· Tell Congress to repeal mandatory military detention, ban #indefinitedetention & fix #NDAA www.aclu.org/fixNDAA @No_More_Torture #June26