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مركزغوانتناموللعدالة Guantanamo Justice Centre |
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Guantamano Turns 8 While More Live Slip Away
Monday January 11 is the 8th anniversary of the U.S. detention center in Guantanamo. The emblematic symbol of the Bush regime’s “war on terror,” in which men were openly tortured, kept in isolation, force-fed, and for years deprived of any legal respresentation or contact with the outside world, is still open. It’s being called “Obama’s prison” now. On January 22, 2009, the new president announced that he would close Guantanamo in a year because it’s existence was a public relations nightmare for U.S. foreign policy makers. As of this week, there’s no closing date, but a vague indication it could be closed in 2011. I learned when reading the new book The Guantanamo Lawyers;Inside a Prison Outside the Law,edited by Mark Denbeaux and Jonathan Hafetz, that the Bush regime opened it on the grounds of a former prison where Haitians and others fleeing poverty were kept in the 80’s and 90’s. The first detainees were kept in open cages, with almost no shelter from the elements. Building new structures allowed the jailers to keep some men in complete isolation. Andy Worthington, in Guantanmo: The Definitive Prisoner List (updated for 2010),called it
Andy wrote this week about Attorney General Holder’s announcement that Obaidullah, an Afghan held in Guantanamo, will be tried by the Obama-style military commission for “war crimes” inTortured Afghan man faces trial by Military Commissions. Andy spoke with World Can’t Wait activists in early 2009, stating his hope, and some confidence, that the Obama administration would establish a process to release the innocent. But he ends the current column on this note
The administration is fighting in federal court on many fronts to continue the Bush detention policies, and just won a victory. According to Stephen Webster, the decision in al-Bihani v Obama “upholds the Bush administration’s broad claims of executive power to detain non-citizens. But we are not just complaining on this anniversary. There’s a call to action toshut down Guantanamo. I’ll be joining Witness Against Torture in protests outside the White House Monday. We will march to the National Press Club, where some of the lawyers defending detainees in Guantanamo will speak about their clients, organized by the Center for Constitutional Rights. That evening, we’ll have a public meeting at Georgetown Law School. I hope you’ll join in. On a last note, the Obama administration has proposed the idea of relocating the detainees to an unused super-max federal prison in Thompson Illinois. World Can’t Wait is completely opposed to the indefinite detention of anyone without legal rights, no matter what the location. Prisoners are held in super-max American prisons already in complete isolation, and I can only imagine that the Guantanamo prisoners could disappear in plain sight along the Mississippi. Margaret Kimberly, editor at the Black Agenda Report, went on a righteous rant, ending her piece called Guantanamo Illinois with
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