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Guantanamo must be closed

Taken from Altercom
March 6, 2006

In Guantanamo, there are more than 500 prisoners from 34 countries.
The majority have been detained for 4 years.
Some of them don’t even have a known name and, to this date,
none have been able to appeal their situation in front of a court of law.

ThisRepublican administration has always shown an Olympic disdain for international public opinion about any issue. However, regarding the political detainees in Guantanamo and other clandestine prisons spread around the world, President Bush should start listening to the clamoring voices coming not only from his enemies but from close allies as well. They all agree in saying: close those reprehensible prisons!

President Bush, as well as Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, and Attorney General, Alberto Gonzales, have repeatedly expressed that the United States do not torture and acts with respect for the law. However, little by little, the truth has come through as more and more photographs depicting the tortures practiced in Iraq’s prisons have seen the light. And quite often we have heard the incredible stories which describe the humiliations suffered by Guantanamo’s detainees.

We have learned that the CIA maintains clandestine prisons in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan where muslins prisoners «disappear». In those centers, the guards utilize techniques to make prisoners talk that must be catalogued without too much hesitation as brutal methods of torture. In Guantanamo, there are more than 500 prisoners from 34 countries. The majority have been detained for 4 years. Some of them don’t even have a known name and, to this date, none have been able to appeal their situation in front of a court of law.

Those prisoners lucky enough to have been liberated from that hell remember desperate detainees hitting their heads against the cell walls. Also known is that more than 60 prisoners went on a hunger strike in protest for the coercive methods used by the guards. No one has died in Guantanamo, but there have been 36 suicidal attempts among the prisoners, one of whom was in a coma for several months. In Iraq and Afghanistan, where torture is a daily occurrence, at least 26 prisoners under the custody of the United States have died.

And all in the name of fighting terrorism.

The report of the Commission on Human Rights of the United Nations egarding the treatment of Guantanamo’s detainees prompted the Secretary General of that organization, Kofi Annan, to demand from President Bush the closing of that center of detention. The New York Times described that prison as the «embarrassment of Guantanamo.» Most recently, the British Parliament joined the voices of governments around the world that have asked President Bush to stop the abuses in Guantanamo Bay and other clandestine jails. Last week, Judge Jed S. Rakoff—presiding over a demand presented by the Associated Press—ordered the Department of Defense to make public the names of those detained in Guantanamo before next Friday. The Department of Defense decided not to appeal the judicial order.

Guantanamo, like the rest of the clandestine prisons, has become a stain for our Democracy and an embarrassment for all honorable Americans that have respect for the human condition.

Those centers of torture violate the laws of the United States and trample international treaties that have been ratified by our country such as the Committee against Torture and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.

This year, there will be elections across the country of governors and legislators; will a concerned politician dare to raise these issues on his or her campaign?

If they don’t do it, we the voters must have enough moral scruples in order not to continue being accomplices of the abuses and illegality practiced by the present leadership of our nation.

 

 

 

 

 

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