Still Shutting Down Guantanamo, Still Saying "No" to Torture

Every
weekday, folks from Witness Against Torture's 100 Days Campaign catch
one of Washington DC's S busses, making our way to the White House for
our vigil. From 11-1 we stand in front of the White House
in orange jumpsuits and black hoods, holding banners and signs calling
for the immediate closure of the prisons at Guantanamo. The
hood is something of a veil, obscuring nearly everything we can see,
immediately putting us in a different, more reflective and, for me,
intensely focused, space. Here, trying to ward off the
cold and snow, sleet and rain, the day's "messaging" melts away, and
I'm often left with the bare basics of why we're there: the prisoners
and their families. With my vision impaired, it's not uncommon for me to close my eyes, thinking and praying about what we've done to those men. The hood, though, doesn't drown out sound, and so I often hear the questions posed by the passers-by. Chief among them is "Why are you here? Isn't it closed already?"

Being under the hood, I find myself in an interesting spot. Ours is a solemn vigil, silent and, for the most part, still. So, I won't - and don't - respond to those questions. The folks who are out leafleting will do that. Sometimes I try to listen, though, to think about what I would say. The simple answer, of course, is no. No, it's not closed, no, there are still men there. No.

I write
this in early February, just a short time after President Obama signed
the executive order "closing" Guantanamo. We didn't get
these kinds of questions before his executive order. No, before that
order, we were greeted most often with warmth and support, approval and
encouragement, not confusion, exasperation and even subtle mockery. It's not that these reactions bother me - they don't at all. What
I find most interesting is that, for the most part, the reactions
changed with a stroke of a pen, as if that one signature magically
freed the men in Guantanamo and wiped away the physical and mental
scars we've cut into them. Guantanamo simply hasn't gone
away, as much as we might wish it would've, and, for the men held there
and their families, it likely never will.

We
began our presence in Washington on January 11, the seventh anniversary
of the transfer of the first prisoners to Guantanamo. That day, over
200 people gathered to hear speakers, to process through the streets of
the capitol and to mark the beginning of yet another year of captivity.
Puppets designed and built by Sue, Hector, Jorge and
their crew helped to dramatize the ways we've hidden so much of our
best selves in a search for security driven by fear - and helped us to
imagine a different world. That day began our liquid-only
fast, which would last until the inauguration. Over 100 people from
around the country joined in the fast, and about 25 or so lived
together in Washington for the nine days, sharing juices and working
together for the closure of the prisons. We came together from north
and south, east and west to fast as a means of repentance for the
horrors done in our names, to fast as an act of solidarity with the
over 70 men in Guantanamo on hunger strike (35 of whom are being
force-fed). In reflecting on these men in particular, men
who had been robbed of every tool to resist their treatment but their
bodies, we came to see and understand our fast as the embodiment of our
desire to see the prisons closed, as our collective "no" enfleshed.

Fasting
has a way of focusing one's thoughts and energies, and over the nine
days we found ourselves increasingly drawn to the Guantanamo prisoners
and their families, linked by even the tiniest of threads. Their words - poems, mostly - began and ended our days. Their stories would suddenly puncture our thoughts, a desperate hold on our consciences that would not abate. We
seemed to float throughout the city in our orange jumpsuits and black
hoods, haunting images of the men pushed away, reminders of the
humanity our nation has tried so hard to extinguish.

We broke the fast on the morning of inauguration day. We
processed through the crowds, moving as orange and black ghosts,
reminding ourselves and the many who gathered around us for leaflets
and photographs that still there were people there. We stood, clad in orange, watching President Obama take the oath of office. There he was, the man who'd promised to put an end to it all.

And then, he did; he signed the executive orders closing Guantanamo and the CIA's black sites and ending torture. Suddenly
the men there were gone, mere afterthoughts to the more pressing
political and legal issues of how it was all to be done. The
details came rushing in, pushing out the prisoners and leaving in their
place questions about timelines, legal options, new courts and
potential jails, questions the men don't have the luxury of asking,
much less waiting for answers to, quite frankly. In a year, we were told, we would be able address all of the various challenges posed by the question of closing Guantanamo. One more year.

But does Ahmed Zaid Salem Zuhair have another year? A forty-four year-old Saudi Arabian man, Mr. Zuhair has been on hunger strike since mid-2005. His forced-feeding began shortly after that. In
November, when his lawyer met with him, Mr. Zuhair weighed a little
over 100 pounds and described the brutal hours-long force-feeding
process as a "saw cutting through my spine." By that point, Mr. Zuhair was vomiting frequently. Seriously
worried about Mr. Zuhair's health, his lawyer filed an emergency motion
in federal court which included a statement from a doctor who'd
reviewed the lawyer's notes (independent medical personnel are not
allowed to see the Guantanamo prisoners). The doctor
testified that Mt. Zuhair's "profound weight loss, associated with
constant vomiting, is a serious and potentially life-threatening
medical problem which the medical staff at Guantanamo have failed to
address." Will it really take another year to sort out the challenges posed by Mr. Zuhair's situation?

Or, could any of us tell the Uighurs they must wait one more year? These
seventeen Chinese Muslims have been held in Guantanamo since 2002,
captured in Afghanistan by bounty hunters who turned them over to the
US, and have been cleared for release since 2003. For over five years, they have been locked up, wrongly imprisoned and waiting to get out. But,
under US and international law, the US cannot send them back to China,
for they legitimately fear intense persecution from the Chinese
government - the Uighurs are among the most persecuted peoples in China. The
Chinese government, for its part, has successfully pressured other
nations who might take them not to, leaving the US as the only place to
which they can be released.

In October, after the US government dropped their classification as enemy combatants, and informed by the Boumediene
case, the third Supreme Court victory for Guantanamo prisoners, US
District Court Judge Ricardo Urbina held that their continued
imprisonment was unlawful and ordered them released into his courtroom. The
Uighurs' lawyers assembled assistance from the US Uighur community,
Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Services and other religious groups in
welcoming and supporting the men. But, the Bush
Administration appealed the order, whisking them from the brink of
release (yet again) back into Guantanamo's grim prisons. All President Obama has to do is drop the appeal. There
has not been, and is not now, any legal basis, any security condition,
much less any moral or humane reason, for extending the imprisonment of
the Uighurs even a day longer, much less a year.

For years, Guantanamo lawyers have told us that the evidence against the vast majority of men in the prison is laughable. The
Center for Constitutional Rights, in a recent report, has shown that
the greatest factor determining whether or not one is still held in
Guantanamo is not innocence or guilt or even how dangerous one is
thought to be, but one's nationality. At its height, Guantanamo held approximately 800 prisoners; at this writing there are roughly 245 men left. Just under 100 of them are Yemenis, with the next largest group from Saudi Arabia. The
Europeans held there were among the first to be released, followed by
prisoners from other countries closely allied with the US. In such an arbitrary system, why another year? We see in the Guantanamo prisoners the truth of a remark a close friend made at Mass here in Washington one day: the powerful say "be patient," and the powerless have to wait.

In reality, the men in Guantanamo are and have always been nothing more than mere pawns in so many political games. They are pawns in the political and diplomatic games nations play with each other. Nothing illustrates this as well as the Uighurs, caught between the US on one hand and China on the other. They have been pawns in the Bush Administration's efforts to redefine executive power. These
so-called "worst of the worst" were manipulated and used in an effort
to create conditions for the expansion of the powers of the presidency;
they were tortured to strengthen a handful of legal theories. And, these men have been and continue to be pawns in our search for somebody to blame for the attacks of September 11, 2001. We locked them up and now appear ready to let them out at some point, and would like to forget about the whole thing. Those
who have been charged with crimes relating to those attacks have seen
their prosecutions proceed not with justice or the truth about that day
in mind, but strictly as a means for politicians of all sorts of
stripes to win political points. Guantanamo may be closed on paper, but for the 245 pawns still there, it is not closed and likely never will be. No
piece of paper will return to the hundreds of men that have been held
there the lives they led before, nor will it return to their children,
parents or wives, then men they knew - nobody and nothing can do that.

Many
of these prisoners have seen at least three important pieces of paper
from the Supreme Court come and go, with the hopes of ending Guantanamo
as we know it rising and falling each time. These pieces
of paper, these Supreme Court decisions together with this new
Executive Order, are necessary, but Guantanamo is not closed and will
not be until the last man is gone. The details do matter,
and we do owe it to the prisoners to make sure Guantanamo is closed and
closed in a good and just way, but, more fundamentally, we owe it to
the men in Guantanamo and their families not to lose them and their
basic humanity amid the political maneuvering and partisan positioning. That is our moral duty, to them and to ourselves, for when we lose sight of their dignity, we lose sight of our own. And so, we're still out there in front of the White House and we're continuing on with our 100 Days Campaign - please join us. Yes, we can close Guantanamo. No, we can't wait another year.