Amnesty International Group 22 Pasadena/Caltech News Volume XVII Number 9, September 2009 UPCOMING EVENTS Thursday, September 24, 7:30 PM. Monthly Meeting. Caltech Y is located off San Pasqual between Hill and Holliston, south side. You will see two curving walls forming a gate to a path-- our building is just beyond. Help us plan future actions on Sudan, the 'War on Terror', death penalty and more. Tuesday October 13, 7:30 PM. Letter writing meeting at Caltech Athenaeum if the downstairs Rathskeller has re-opened, otherwise at Panera Bread coffee house, 3521 E. Foothill, Pasadena. Please check Group 22 website for location. This informal gathering is a great way for newcomers to get acquainted with Amnesty. Sunday, October 18, 6:30 PM. Rights Readers Human Rights Book Discussion Group. Vroman's Bookstore, 695 E. Colorado Blvd., Pasadena. This month we read "The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao" by Junot Diaz. Sunday, October 4, Monthly Movie Night. Time and location TBD. COORDINATOR'S CORNER Hi everyone, First off, I want to thank everyone for their offers of help and support when Robert was ill over Labor Day weekend. Gracias a Dios, he is completely recovered. It was a pretty scary experience, but I am thankful for the good medical care that he received and for friends and family. This issue is turning out to be our China issue! Group 22 member Laura Brown spent part of her summer teaching in Xaioshan, China. Read of her experiences and observations in this newsletter. Wen Chen and Daniel Wang also have written a piece on the volunteer human rights lawyers in China who have assisted Falun Gong practictioners and others. Despite my resolution to finish Oscar Wao en espanol before the October book group meeting, I am less than half-way through the book! What is interesting about this novel is that it was originally written in English, and then translated into Spanish. Even my Spanish teacher, who is from Argentina and Spain, didn't know the Dominican slang! Con carino, Kathy ERITREA UPDATE By Joyce Wolf In last month's column I wrote about a report that Group 22's adopted prisoner of conscience, Estifanos Seyoum, was one of nine G-15 prisoners who died in while in secret detention. I attributed the report to "Assena.com", which is an incorrect spelling of the organization's name. I apologize for any confusion caused by my error. The spelling is either Assenna or Asena, and the home page of their website is http://asena.samai.co.uk. (You can go directly to the article about the G-15 prisoners using http://tinyurl.com/ojgw8q.) Amnesty has not yet confirmed the deaths of the nine G-15 POCs, but it seems probable that the reports are correct. My suggestion for this month's action is to support Palo Alto Group 19's efforts for Mattewos Habteab, an Eritrean journalist who was arrested in the 18 September 2001 crackdown along with the G-15 POCs and other journalists. This month is the eighth anniversary of their arrest. Background information about Mattewos and Eritrea is available at www.freeeritreanjournalists.org. Here is a sample letter that you can use as a guideline. Mr. Simone Joseph Foreign Affairs Officer on Africa Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor U.S. State Department 2201 C Street NW Washington, DC 205200 Dear Sir, I am very concerned about Mattewos Habteab and other independent journalists in Eritrea - including Said Abdulkadir, Yosuf Mohamed Ali, Amanuel Asrat, Temesgen Gebreyesus, Dawit Habtemichael, Medhanie Haile Ali, Dawit Isaac, Seyoum Tsehaye, Saleh Al-Jezaeri, and Hamid Mohamed Said - who have been held for more than eight years in secret detention without charges or trial and with no access to their families or to legal counsel. Some of them have reportedly died in prison. Amnesty International considers them to be prisoners of conscience, imprisoned solely for carrying out their journalistic duties. I respectfully urge that US government engage in dialogue with the Eritrean government to bring about: 1. Eritrean authority's acknowledgement of the journalists' detention and the disclosure of their whereabouts. 2. An independent team visiting the prisons where the journalists are being held and reporting publicly on their conditions. 3. The granting of the families' visitation rights. Thank you for your attention to this urgent matter. Sincerely, [your name and address] RIGHTS READERS Human Rights Book Discussion Group Keep up with Rights Readers at http://rightsreaders.blogspot.com Next Rights Readers meeting: Sunday, October 18, 6:30 PM Vroman's Bookstore 695 E. Colorado Boulevard in Pasadena New York Times Book Review Travails of an Outcast By MICHIKO KAKUTANI Published: September 4, 2007 Junot Diaz's "Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao" is a wondrous, not-so-brief first novel that is so original it can only be described as Mario Vargas Llosa meets "Star Trek" meets David Foster Wallace meets Kanye West. It is funny, street-smart and keenly observed, and it unfolds from a comic portrait of a second-generation Dominican geek into a harrowing meditation on public and private history and the burdens of familial history. An extraordinarily vibrant book that's fueled by adrenaline-powered prose, it's confidently steered through several decades of history by a madcap, magpie voice that's equally at home talking about Tolkien and Trujillo, anime movies and ancient Dominican curses, sexual shenanigans at Rutgers University and secret police raids in Santo Domingo. Mr. Diaz, the author of a critically acclaimed collection of short stories published in 1996 ("Drown"), writes in a sort of streetwise brand of Spanglish that even the most monolingual reader can easily inhale: lots of flash words and razzle- dazzle talk, lots of body language on the sentences, lots of David Foster Wallace-esque footnotes and asides. And he conjures with seemingly effortless aplomb the two worlds his characters inhabit: the Dominican Republic, the ghost-haunted motherland that shapes their nightmares and their dreams; and America (a k a New Jersey), the land of freedom and hope and not-so-shiny possibilities that they've fled to as part of the great Dominican diaspora. Oscar, Mr. Diaz's homely homeboy hero, is "not one of those Dominican cats everybody's always going on about - he wasn't no home-run hitter or a fly bachatero, not a playboy" with a million hot girls on the line. No, Oscar is a fat, self-loathing dweeb and aspiring science fiction writer, who dreams of becoming "the Dominican Tolkien." He's one of those kids who tremble with fear during gym class and use "a lot of huge- sounding nerd words like indefatigable and ubiquitous" when talking to kids who could barely finish high school. He moons after girls who won't give him the time of day and enters and leaves college a sad virgin. He wears "his nerdiness like a Jedi wore his light saber"; he "couldn't have passed for Normal if he'd wanted to." Two of this novel's narrators, Oscar's beautiful sister, Lola - a "Banshees-loving punk chick," who becomes "one of those tough Jersey dominicanas" who order men about like houseboys - and Yunior, Oscar's college roommate and Lola's onetime boyfriend, do their best to try to get him to shape up. They exhort him to eat less and exercise more, to leave his dorm room and venture out into the world. Oscar makes a halfhearted effort and then tells Yunior to leave him alone. He goes back to his writing, his day-dreams, his suicidal thoughts. Yunior (who seems very much like the Yunior who appeared in some of Mr. Diaz's short stories) begins to think that Oscar may be living under a family curse, "a high-level fuku" not unlike the curse on the House of Atreus, which has doomed him, like his mother, to lasting unhappiness in love. In due course we also hear the story of Oscar and Lola's mother, Beli, a tough, tough-talking woman whose hard-nosed street cred is rooted in a childhood of almost unimaginable pain and loss: her wealthy father, tortured and incarcerated by the Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo's thugs; her mother, run over by a truck after her husband's imprisonment; her two sisters, dead in freak, suspicious accidents. The orphaned Beli herself was abused and beaten before being rescued by her father's kindly cousin, and as a teenager she has a disastrous affair with a charismatic and dangerous man known as the Gangster - one of Trujillo's men, who happens to be married to Trujillo's sister. That affair culminates in a savage beating in the cane fields, a beating that nearly ends Beli's life and that will propel her toward a new life in exile in the United States. Mr. Diaz writes about the Trujillo era of the Dominican Republic with the same authority he writes about contemporary New Jersey, the slangy, kinetic energy of his prose proving to be a remarkably effective tool for capturing the absurdities of the human condition, be they the true horrors of living in a dictatorship that can erase a person or a family on a whim, or the self- indulgent difficulties of being a college student coping with issues of weight and self-esteem. Here is Mr. Diaz writing about Trujillo: "Homeboy dominated Santo Domingo like it was his very own private Mordor; not only did he lock the country away from the rest of the world, isolate it behind the Platano Curtain, he acted like it was his very own plantation, acted like he owned everything and everyone, killed whomever he wanted to kill, sons, brothers, fathers, mothers, took women away from their husbands on their wedding nights and then would brag publicly about 'the great honeymoon' he'd had the night before. His Eye was everywhere; he had a Secret Police that out- Stasi'd the Stasi, that kept watch on everyone, even those everyones who lived in the States." It is Mr. Diaz's achievement in this galvanic novel that he's fashioned both a big picture window that opens out on the sorrows of Dominican history, and a small, intimate window that reveals one family's life and loves. In doing so, he's written a book that decisively establishes him as one of contemporary fiction's most distinctive and irresistible new voices. Author Biography Junot Diaz was born in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic and is the author of Drown and The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao which won the John Sargent Sr. First Novel Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize and the 2008 Pulitzer Prize. His fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, African Voices, Best American Short Stories (1996, 1997, 1999, 2000), in Pushcart Prize XXII and in The O'Henry Prize Stories 2009. He has received a Eugene McDermott Award, a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, a Lila Acheson Wallace Readers Digest Award, the 2002 Pen/Malamud Award, the 2003 US-Japan Creative Artist Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, a fellowship at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University and the Rome Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He is the fiction editor at the Boston Review and the Rudge (1948) and Nancy Allen professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. From http://wwwjunotdiaz.com HUMAN RIGHTS IN CHINA By Laura G. Brown I spent five weeks in China this summer, touring Beijing and Shanghai and staying a month in Xiaoshan, to teach English to 8th graders. It was the first time I'd spent any length of time in a Communist country, and my misgivings were such that I kept a sharp eye on my passport - I found a secret hiding place in my hotel room as I traveled daily back and forth to school. I was careful not to bring up Falun Gong or the plight of Muslim Uighurs, even though Uighurs had rioted in Urumqi on July 5, the day I arrived. Chinese officials immediately blocked Facebook, Twitter, and other internet sites; this lasted for the duration of our visit. Luckily, a computer whiz in our group had a program called Freegate, which bypassed the Chinese controls and let us access some of the sites. Interestingly, just when I returned to the USA, Chinese computer controls were again in the news. According to Peter Foster of The Daily Telegraph, China's information technology minister said that the so-called "Green Dam Youth Escort" software would now be "voluntary", leaving users free to decide whether or not to install it. Previously, China had said that all of its computers must have the Green Dam software, officially as a measure to protect children and combat pornography on the web. Internet users saw it as an attempt to tighten internet restrictions. We saw this censorship daily at our campus, Xiaoshan Middle School, which boasts a computer, and projector in each classroom, and internet in the teacher's office (but not one flush toilet or reliable soap dispenser). Need a YouTube to illustrate a concept in English? Sorry. You can't go there. Want to check an attachment on one of your emails? You may not be able to open it. And so on. Maybe internet censorship explains why the Chinese still revere Chairman Mao Zedong, widely credited with causing the deaths of 40,000,000 people. You can find Mao's likeness everywhere in Beijing. His picture hung from our tour bus's rearview mirror. Our tour guide said his mother has his picture on her wall, and she regularly puts out cigarettes on a plate as homage to him, because Mao liked to smoke. His larger- than-life portrait still hangs prominently in Tiananmen Square. He's on nearly every piece of currency (called RMB, or yuan). The middle school where I worked hangs his portrait in the conference room, along with another state hero: Josef Stalin. No Chinese person I spoke with had a harsh word for Mao. What kind of misinformation are they getting? I wondered. I later found out that they don't know much about the United States - students in my class did not know the city of Los Angeles, or even Hollywood, for that matter. They had never heard about our 4th of July holiday. They had no idea what a schoolteacher's salary might be - and expressed amazement when told a teacher could earn $50,000 per year. On a more serious note, China shows no inclination to slow down the pace of its executions. When I mentioned this to my school liaison, a very educated Chinese man, he said that due to China's huge population of 1.3 billion people, they had to "make an example" of people who threatened social order. He also believed that China's one child policy, advertised on billboards everywhere, was necessary, and explained that both he and his girlfriend were only children. Because of this, they were allowed to have two children, if they desired. He seemed to accept unreservedly that the government should decide the size of his family. The last thing I did before leaving China was to pick up a copy of the August 8-9 China Daily to read on my Beijing-Los Angeles flight. The lead story was Olympic Games chairman Jiang Xiayou saying, on the anniversary of the Beijing Olympics, that there was more press openness in China now. I had seen differently with internet sites being blocked at the onset of the Urumqi riots. Continuing with the China Daily, I noticed a small "In Brief" item on page 2: "Airport Boss Executed." It seems that a corrupt official embezzled millions from the government. He was convicted in February. February to August--I commend China on its speedy resolution of capital cases. Mr. Li, the airport embezzler, was 60. Were his organs usable? I say this because there are reports by mainstream publications that Falun Gong prisoners are being killed and their organs harvested. "Organ selling is a huge business for the Chinese. You can obtain organs in China as you can nowhere else: any type, and very speedily," reports Jay Nordlinger, senior editor of the National Review. China is careening toward capitalism. The most striking phenomenon I observed during my visit was the stark contrast between ancient and modern. I especially noticed this in Beijing, where I saw donkey carts and bicycles carrying huge loads of scrap metal and cardboard weaving through lanes of new cars (mostly American models). People carried things to sell in yoke baskets. Laundry hung out to dry over Guess and Nike stores. Hammers and pickaxes do masonry work; bamboo scaffolding supports emerging high-rises. An army of cranes attempts to lift up seemingly all of China. Yet the country pollutes on a grand scale. According to the New York Times, it has surpassed the U.S. as the leading producer of garbage, and its toxic incinerators threaten the air quality of the Pacific Coast. I saw dull, brown skies every day during my month I stayed in the industrial city of Xiaoshan. Even after a daylong rain, the sky is hazy and dull. When I'd heard last year that athletes doubted they could compete in Beijing because of the air quality, I was skeptical. How could the air be that bad? I've changed my mind after seeing and smelling it up close. China represses human rights. It engages in censorship, jailing of political opponents, and frequent use of the death penalty. They are slowly making changes in some of these areas (particularly those that affect them economically) but they're no Western democracy. Yet, China is a beautiful country with friendly people. I say I'd like sugar in my rice porridge. A bowl of sugar appears every day from then on. I want to swim in a local pool. My school translator arranges a cab, takes me there, and works out all the details, since I can't speak Chinese. I ran into this kind of hospitality time and time again. It's enough to make you want to return to China! HUMAN RIGHTS LAWYERS IN CHINA By Wen Chen and Daniel Wang "Human rights lawyer" was a term that very few people in China knew about back ten years ago. Although people still remembered the 1989 Tiananmen Massacre, most Chinese people already felt that it was hopeless to argue with the government, and younger generations did not even know the existence of the massacre since the incident was not allowed to be mentioned anywhere in public, except by the state-run media, which defined it as a "political riot". People just passively accepted all the mistreatments and abuses they received, and didn't even think about seeking for legal help. When the crackdown on Falun Gong happened in 1999, millions of Falun Gong practitioners went to Beijing to appeal to the central government for their rights. The movement already surprised many Chinese people --how dare you appeal to the government, and what use is it? In the people's mind, when the communist party decides to wipe out an organization, it will for sure disappear within a couple of days. But Falun Gong did not disappear. Their courageous efforts actually enlightened those who want to defend their rights without resorting to violence. Nowadays, Falun Gong practitioners have turned their efforts underground. Instead of appealing to the government and getting jailed right away, they print flyers and pass them out to every family, sometimes risking their lives to do so. However, nowadays there is an estimate of more than 20 million Chinese people appealing to the government for their rights, from farmers who lost their land to city home owners who lost their houses. People start to speak out and actively seek for legal assistance. The internet has definitely helped a lot in spreading out information and awakening people's consciences. It is encouraging to read stories of Chinese human rights lawyers. They are not political dissidents or human rights victims, but they dare to speak out for those victims. The first human rights lawyer I heard about was Mr. Gao Zhisheng. He was one of the first lawyers who did "non-guilty" defense for Falun Gong practitioners, while the government forbids any lawyer to do so. Mr. Gao is a Christian and one of the "ten most outstanding Chinese lawyers". He always allocates a third of his time to defend human rights cases free of charge. Besides defending the rights of Falun Gong practitioners, he also wrote open letters to high level Chinese government officials. His actions immediately caught attention. Soon his license was revoked and he was constantly monitored and then arrested by the Chinese secret police since 2006. His wife and two children escaped to the United States in March 2009, but Mr. Gao is still detained in China at this moment. Gao Zhisheng's actions motivated many Chinese attorneys. Now there are at least several dozen well known Chinese attorneys actively working on human rights cases. Recently, the LA Times reported the story of a Chinese attorney, Mr. Xu Zhiyong, who represents the parents of children sickened or died last year as a result of dangerous milk additives. http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/ la-fg-china-lawyer7-2009aug07,0,954498.story The change of a society starts with the change of the individuals. The surge of Chinese human rights lawyers reflects the change of Chinese society. When more and more Chinese people step forward to defend their rights and more lawyers dare to help the victims, the dam of communist repression becomes fragile and may collapse soon. (Falun Gong is a body and mind exercise based on the principle of "Truth-Compassion- Tolerance". Originated in China, and now practiced by about 100 million people in over 100 countries, Falun Gong has been well known for its health benefits and peaceful principles. However, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) started a crackdown on Falun Gong in 1999 as it regarded the group as threat to the power of CCP, who always maintains control of the thinking of the Chinese people, usually via media propaganda, information blockages and direct control of all organizations. By today, more than 3,000 death cases in police custody have been confirmed and more than one million Falun Gong practitioners are detained.) DEATH PENALTY ACTION From Stevi Carroll http://takeaction.amnestyusa.org/siteapps/a dvocacy/index.aspx?c=jhKPIXPCIoE&b=2590179 &template=x.ascx&action=13118 UPDATE: On September 18, a Federal district court issued a 10-day restraining order which will prevent Ohio from carrying out the execution as scheduled on September 22. Romell Broom is still at risk of execution in the near future. URGENT ACTION APPEAL - From Amnesty International USA 18 September 2009 UA 245/09 - Death penalty USA Romell Broom (m) Romell Broom, a 53-year-old African American man, was taken to be executed on 15 September, but the team administering the lethal injection failed to find a useable vein, and gave up after two hours. The State of Ohio has now rescheduled his execution for 22 September. Romell Broom has been on death row for nearly a quarter of a century. He was sentenced to death in 1985 for the rape and murder of 14-year- old Tryna Middleton in September 1984. After the death sentence was upheld on appeal, Broom sought to join a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of Ohio's lethal injection process. However, the courts dismissed his attempt, ruling that the challenge was time-barred and should have been made earlier. Romell Broom's execution was set for 15 September 2009 at 10am. The execution was delayed for several hours as a final appeal to the federal courts was awaited. Between 1 and 2pm, after the courts had lifted the stay of execution, the lethal injection team began preparations for the execution. After an hour of the team trying to find a suitable vein in his arms, Romell Broom tried to help them. According to Associated Press, "When his help made no difference, he turned onto his back and covered his face with both hands. His torso heaved up and down and his feet shook. He wiped his eyes and was handed a roll of toilet paper, which he used to wipe his brow." Romell Broom's lawyer was in the attorney waiting room. When she questioned the delay she was taken to a room where she could watch the procedure on closed-circuit television. She has said that "it was perfectly apparent that the execution was going very wrong", and that Romell Broom was "wincing in pain" as the execution team held him down and tried to find a vein. At one point, she said, "they really hurt him", and he "grimaced in pain". She contacted her co-counsel to tell him what was happening Ð that the execution team had been trying for two hours to find a vein and had apparently now taken a "break." The co-counsel sent a letter by fax and email to the state Governor and the Chief Justice of the Ohio Supreme Court, urging that the execution be stopped. His letter to the court pointed out that in the ongoing legal challenge to Ohio's lethal injection protocol, the state's position had been that "the medical members of the execution team are skilled at obtaining IV access." Governor Strickland, who had earlier denied Bloom clemency, issued a one-week reprieve. The warrant reads, "Difficulties in administering the execution protocol necessitate a temporary reprieve to allow the Department [of corrections] to recommend appropriate next steps to me... The Department should carry out Mr Broom's sentence [on 22 September] unless further reprieve or clemency is granted." On 17 September, in relation to the Ohio lethal injection lawsuit, a federal judge ordered that by 21 September a statement be taken from Romell Broom about the execution attempt, and that the state disclose relevant documents by 28 September. BACKGROUND INFORMATION On 3 May 1946, Willie Francis, an African American prisoner convicted of a murder committed when he was 17 years old, was taken to Louisiana's death chamber and placed in the electric chair, but due to some malfunction in the equipment, he survived and was returned to his cell. In January 1947, the US Supreme Court concluded that the prisoner's constitutional rights had not been violated, dismissing the argument that because he had undergone the mental strain of preparing for execution, to require him to undergo it again would be to subject him to a lingering and cruel punishment. The Court continued, "Even the fact that petitioner has already been subjected to a current of electricity does not make his subsequent execution any more cruel in the constitutional sense than any other execution. The cruelty against which the Constitution protects a convicted man is cruelty inherent in the method of punishment, not the necessary suffering involved in any method employed to extinguish life humanely. The fact that an unforeseeable accident prevented the prompt consummation of the sentence cannot, it seems to us, add an element of cruelty to a subsequent execution." Willie Francis was returned to the electric chair on 9 May 1947 and killed. In the six decades since that chilling episode, the world has turned inexorably against the death penalty, recognizing its inherent flaws. Today, 139 countries are abolitionist in law or practice. The USA, in contrast, has carried out 1,174 executions since resuming judicial killing in 1977, with 1,003 carried out by lethal injection, the method currently promoted by advocates of the death penalty as "humane." In April 2007 the US Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of Kentucky's execution protocol. A majority of the USA's death penalty states, and the federal government, use the same three-drug combination as Kentucky to anaesthetize, paralyze and kill the condemned prisoner. In its Baze v. Rees ruling, the Court recalled its 1947 decision in the Francis case, noting that "simply because an execution method may result in pain, either by accident or as an inescapable consequence of death, does not establish the sort of objectively intolerable risk of harm that qualifies as cruel and unusual." There have been regular "botched" lethal injections in the USA. In Ohio in May 2006, for example, it took the execution team 22 minutes to find a useable vein in Joseph Clark's arm for insertion of the catheter. A few minutes later, however, the vein collapsed, and Clark's arm began to swell. The team then tried for another 30 minutes to find another vein, while witnesses heard "moaning, crying out and guttural noises" coming from behind the curtain. Death was pronounced about 90 minutes after the execution began. The following year, also in Ohio, the execution team struggled to find useable veins in Christopher Newton's arms, and the prisoner was not declared dead until almost two hours after the execution process began. Amnesty International opposes the death penalty in all cases, unconditionally, regardless of the method chosen to kill the condemned prisoner. The death penalty is inherently cruel and degrading, incompatible with human dignity. To end the death penalty is to abandon a destructive, diversionary and divisive public policy that is not consistent with widely held values. It not only runs the risk of irrevocable error, it is also costly, to the public purse as well as in social and psychological terms. It has not been proved to have a special deterrent effect. It tends to be applied in a discriminatory way, on grounds of race and class. It denies the possibility of reconciliation and rehabilitation. It prolongs the suffering of the murder victim's family, and extends that suffering to the loved ones of the condemned prisoner. It diverts resources that could be better used to work against violent crime and assist those affected by it. There have been 38 executions in the USA this year, four of them in Ohio. RECOMMENDED ACTION: Please send appeals to arrive as quickly as possible: - Pointing out the inherent cruelty of the death penalty, starkly illustrated in this case, with a man under sentence of death for nearly 25 years put through a failed execution attempt and now having to prepare for another execution date; - Calling on the Governor to stop this execution and to reconsider his decision to deny Romell Bloom clemency; - Explaining that you are not seeking to excuse violent crime or to downplay the suffering caused to its victims. APPEALS TO: Governor Ted Strickland, Governor's Office, Riffe Center, 30th Floor, 77 South High Street Columbus, OH 43215-6108 Fax: 1 614 466 9354 Email: http://www.governor.ohio.gov/Assistance/Con tacttheGovernor/tabid/150/Default.aspx Salutation: Dear Governor PLEASE SEND APPEALS IMMEDIATELY. Check with the AIUSA Urgent Action office if sending appeals after 22 September 2009. MONTHLY LETTER COUNT UAs 20 Total 20 To add your letters to the total contact lwkamp@gmail.com. Amnesty International Group 22 The Caltech Y Mail Code 5-62 Pasadena, CA 91125 www.its.caltech.edu/~aigp22/ http://rightsreaders.blogspot.com