With public readings of the play Guantánamo: ‘Honor Bound to Defend Freedom’ the Guantánamo Reading Project focuses attention on the shameful and unlawful detentions at the U.S. naval base in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. The project’s goal is to encourage local debate and action to support the remaining detainees’ habeas rights to challenge their detentions in federal court, as upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2004.

 

Guantánamo:Honor Bound to Defend Freedom

Columbia S.C. Reading Oct. 25, 7:30 PM, USC's Drayton Theatre

October 25, 7:30 pm, Drayton Hall, Univ. of South Carolina (Free)

A play reading about Guantanamo Bay Detention Center drawing attention to the challenges this prison presents to our Constitution’s Bill of Rights.

Department of Theater and Dance in the College of Arts and Sciences, University of South Carolina. (The director of the play and actors will be at the Special Showing of the film at the Nickelodeon).

Carolina Peace Resource Center (http://www.carolinapeace.org)
Bill of Rights Defense Committee (http://www.bordc.com)
Midlands ACLU (http://www.aclusc.org/Midlands/)
University of South Carolina College of Arts and Sciences
Nickelodeon Theater (http://www.nickelodeon.org)

Guantánamo: ‘Honor Bound to Defend Freedom’ is the work of playwrights Victoria Brittain and Gillian Slovo from spoken evidence and letters from British detainees to their families. The play was commissioned by London’s Tricycle Theatre in January 2004 and played there and at the New Ambassadors Theatre, followed by amateur readings throughout the U.K. The play has had U.S. runs and readings in many cities including New York, Tucson, Northampton, San Francisco, San Diego and Boston.

The Guantánamo Reading Project is a collaboration of the Center for Constitutional Rights and the Bill of Rights Defense Committee. Robert Meeropol and the Rosenberg Fund for Children (www.rfc.org) helped develop the idea of producing Guantánamo: ‘Honor Bound to Defend Freedom’ in communities around the world.

On October 25, 2006, the USC Department of Theater and Speech will put on a performance of this play in, by, and for our community. The moving first-hand accounts recreated in the play put a human face on the legal struggle to get the detainees their day in court. Showing the often horrific conditions the detainees have faced at Guantánamo, this reading of the play also brings attention to the Bush Administration’s flagrant disregard of the Supreme Court’s decision which ruled that the detainees have the right to challenge their detention in U.S. courts. This play is a vehicle for examining whether basic rights can or should be denied to people who are in our custody and who have been declared by the executive branch to be our enemies. The Columbia, S.C. reading will be followed by a discussion of the play and the issues it raises. Through this combination of art and politics we hope to learn more about our constitutional rights, our international legal obligations to respect human rights, our government’s interpretation and violation of those rights, and the consequences that will affect us all.

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