Vietnam, Central America, Iraq, Guantánamo

U.S. Imperialism’s Machinery of Torture

Since a mass hunger strike at the U.S. Guantánamo prison camp began in February, the number of detainees participating has grown to at least 100. Their jailers have met this protest against being detained indefinitely in the notorious torture center with what U.S. security forces know best: more brutality. Twice a day, guards take detainees, one by one, from their cells to a separate room and subject them to forced feedings.

In late April, 40 medics were added to the team handling the prisoners, “pulling them into rooms where they are strapped to chairs and have rubber tubes stuck into their noses and snaked down to their stomachs, then pumping in a can’s worth of a liquid nutritional supplement” (“A Hundred Hungry Men at Guantánamo,” New Yorker, 1 May). On May 13, Al Jazeera released official U.S. policy documents detailing the procedures for this sadistic process. The detainees are made to wear masks over their mouths while they sit shackled for as long as two hours until testing confirms the liquid has reached their stomachs.

Eighty-six of the remaining 166 detainees had been cleared for release years ago. The rest, as the New Yorker noted, “are roughly divided between those the Administration says it might bestir itself to bring a case against someday, and those it acknowledges it doesn’t have enough evidence against, but finds somehow unsettling, and so is locking up anyway.” The Guantánamo prisoners, many indiscriminately rounded up by the U.S. military around 2002 or sold to their captors by local forces for bounty, were from the outset physically brutalized and subjected to intense psychological torment and humiliation designed to break them. These desperate men fear they will never get out alive. We demand: Free the detainees now!

With his liberal supporters wringing their hands over the hunger strikes, President Obama briefly rediscovered his old campaign promise to close Guantánamo, citing concerns on April 30 that “it is expensive, it is inefficient, it hurts us in terms of our international standing.” While Obama cynically blames Congress for supposedly tying his hands, his plan to close Guantánamo was never a plan to end the system of indefinite detention, only to relocate it onto American soil. The top Pentagon official for detainee policy recently told the New York Times that, even if Congress dropped its restrictions on transferring the detainees, “I don’t believe the numbers would change radically” (24 April). Indeed, a year before Congress imposed the restrictions, Obama barred repatriations to Yemen, home of the majority of the detainees cleared for release. Meanwhile, the military has spent millions of dollars in recent years on a state-of-the-art courthouse at Guantánamo, housing for lawyers and guards, and other construction. The Pentagon is requesting nearly $200 million more for further upgrades. (read on)