Central Library, Foyle Street, Derry
3.00pm – 4.30pm
The Bloody Sunday March Committee are delighted to host Tommy McKearney in conversation with former Guantánamo Bay prisoner Mansoor Adayfi.
Mansoor Adayfi is writer, artist, activist, and a former Guantánamo prisoner held hostage by the United States for over 14 years without charge, spending 8 of those years in solitary confinement. A Yemeni national he was released to Serbia in 2016, where he struggles to make a new life for himself and to shed the designation of suspected terrorist. In 2019, Adayfi won the Richard J. Margolis Award for nonfiction writers of social justice journalism. His memoir, Don’t Forget Us Here, Lost and Found at Guantánamo was released in August 2021. He works as Cage’s Guantánamo Project Coordinator.
Tommy McKearney, a native of Moy, Co. Tyrone, is a former Hunger Striker, who undertook 53 days of Hunger Strike in 1980 whilst he was a member of the IRA, in protest of British Occupation of Ireland and its criminalisation policy. Tommy is a Socialist Republican, a Trade Union Organiser & Author of ‘The Provisional IRA, From Insurrection to Parliament’.
This event will put the focus back on American and Western policies and individuals who have created so many refugees in our lifetimes and the “intelligence” agencies using our infrastructures and treating the 26 counties as a soft touch.
Mansoor has positively identified Republican candidate for U.S President, Ron De Santis as one of the individuals who participated in and witnessed his torture in Guántanamo. With Shannon Airport being identified as “Part of the US Military conveyor- belt of death” and concerns about its use in Extraordinary Rendition, come along and hear Mansoor’s story of torture and incarceration and ask yourself what role the 26 counties administration has played in such cases by allowing Shannon Airport to be used in U.S Military Operations.