6 years on – Shut down Guantanamo now!

6 years on – Shut down Guantanamo now!

On January 11th 1908 Mahatma Gandhi received his first ever prison sentence (2 months) in Johannesburg, South Africa, for failing to register as Asiatic. 100 years later, on January 11th, the world not only celebrates Gandhi's act of resistance against a racist South African State, but also mourns the continued existence of the notorious U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba - 6 years since the first prisoners arrived to the detention camps as 'enemy combatants.'

There are over 300 prisoners at the U.S. detention centres who have spent up to 2,192 days in legal limbo, separated from their loved ones and forced to endure horrific treatment. To mark the 6th anniversary, human rights activists will be gathering in protest at U.S. Embassies and other relevant sites in over 40 cities worldwide, from Warsaw to San Francisco. We will be demanding that the victims of torture be granted immediate release or swift access to fair trials not conducted in or by the U.S. authorities, who themselves should face war tribunals for their crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan.

In Warsaw we will gather at the U.S. embassy at 8 a.m., just in time to invite the embassy staff and people queueing for visas to join our call to 'Shut Down Guantanamo and all U.S. military prisons'. Equipment like orange prison uniforms, ear muffs, blacked-out goggles, black bags (items for sensory deprivation) will be used to highlight the brutal treatment imposed at Guantanamo. We encourage people to bring plastic spoons and fruit, vegetable, flower seeds to the demonstration so we can hand them into the embassy to send to the prison in Cuba. Some Guantanamo inmates have started illegal gardening projects at the various camps, digging the soil with their spoons and using the seeds from their food to plant.

We live in a world where being in the wrong place at the wrong time, or having the 'wrong' skin colour with a beard that looks too long is enough to have you incarcerated in Guantanamo Bay. Some of the claims made by U.S. officials towards a minority of the inmates may indeed be true, but there is colossal evidence now that the vast majority of them were innocent bystanders or insignificant players handed over to U.S. authorities by Pakistani Intelligence Services and the Afghan Northern Alliance.

The U.S. military distributed rewards amounting to thousands of dollars in bounty money for the capture of 'terrorism suspects' after the terrorist attacks in the U.S. on September 11th, 2001.
For those with a lust for money or suffering from poverty, becoming an 'informer' was evidently a profitable business. Whether the person you informed on was innocent or not made no difference.
Therefore, being in Pakistan or Afghanistan in late 2001 or early 2002 was sufficient for you to be suspected a terrorist, abducted, tortured and arbitrarily detained in one of the 'War on Terror' gulags operated by the United States gvt.

In Washington D.C. one year ago, on the 5th anniversary of Guantanamo's prison gates opening, over 500 people marched from the Supreme Court to the Federal court, dressed in orange suits to represent the prisoners. 150 people risked arrest on behalf of the men in Guantanamo. By the end of the manifestation, 88 nonviolent activists had been arrested inside the Federal Court, the majority of whom refused to tell police their identity, taking the names of prisoners at Guantanamo instead.
The demonstrations throughout the U.S. were organised under the umbrella campaign, Witness Against Torture (www.witnesstorture.org), endorsed by the Catholic Worker Movement, Amnesty International, War Resisters League, American Civil Liberties Union, the International Federation for Human Rights, and over 100 other groups. These groups will reassemble with a common voice this Friday.

Over on this side of the world, 40 of us organised and participated in a street theatre action and 'prison walk' at the U.S. embassy and Polish Ministry of Defence in Warsaw in January, 2007. We assembled to bring to light the ongoing Polish participation in the Iraq and Afghan occupations, as well as the CIA's use of Szymany airport, north of Warsaw, for their illegal and immoral 'extraordinary rendition' abduction and torture programme.

Since January 11, 2001, 800 men from various nationalities have had to endure the harsh conditions at Guantanamo - including waterboarding, physical beatings, and psychological torture. Just one detainee has ever been convicted (a minor charge of which he has already being freed), and only a few more still await concrete charges of aiding and abetting terrorism. Over 400 former suspects have been released. In 2006, the president of the Belgian Senate led an official inspection team to Guantanamo facilitated by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE). Their conclusion was that "we could have only 30 to 40 real valuable cases."

Furthermore, the Combatant Status Review Tribunals established by the Bush Adminstration to determine whether the prisoners have been correctly designated as 'enemy combatants' was ruled illegal by the U.S. Supreme Court. Although it is estimated that up to 300 people remain imprisoned at Camps Delta, Echo and Iguana, even U.S. government officials admit that no more than 80 are likely to face any charges and ultimately stand trial. It is accepted that over 75% of the men are innocent of any involvement in terrorism and will eventually be freed, though this could still take months or even years as the U.S. Government claim they are having problems in finding places to send them.

One such prisoner is from Yemen. After hundreds of hours of interrogation and torture, accused of being a bodyguard of Osama Bin Laden, he eventually "admitted" to having seen Bin Laden five times: "Three times on Al Jazeera and twice on Yemeni news." His interrogators wrote the following in his file: "Detainee admitted to knowing Osama Bin Laden." This is just one example of how the U.S. military have manipulated and forced so-called 'confessions' from the suffering prisoners.

Nevertheless, there is hopeful signs that our campaigns are working. We celebrate the fact that since our actions last year a number of prisoners have been released, including four whose pictures we had on placards at the Warsaw action last year. These included British residents Bisher El-Rawi and Jamil El-Banna, abducted in Gambia in early 2002, and who have not been charged with any offence under British law since their repatriation.

Our continued vigilance will eventually succeed in shutting down this terrible chapter in human rights abuse, but our quest to ensure the civil rights of prisoners throughout the world are respected will have to be sustained in order to bear fruit.

Through these global actions on January 11th, 2008, people of conscience throughout the world will demand the U.S. government:

*Repeal the Military Commissions Act and restore Habeas Corpus

*Charge and try or release all detainees,

*Forbid torture and all other forms of cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment,

*Pay reparations to current and former detainees and their families for violations of their human rights, and

*Shut down Guantánamo, Abu Ghraib, Bagram, and all other U.S. prisons overseas, including secret CIA detention facilities.

For worldwide action reports and photos please visit Witness Torture

For the Polish action report and photos please visit CIA