The Never-Ending Injustice

The Guantanamo prisoners had to resort to a hunger strike in order to remind the world that there’s something still happening there. One hundred sixty-six prisoners, many incarcerated already for years, sit there not yet charged with or tried for any crime and without hope of ever being released.

President Obama’s cocky promise at the start of his first term that he would quickly close the detention facility at Guantanamo hasn’t been fulfilled. He ran into opposition on that promise and gave in. Other policy matters seemed more pressing as well as more promising.

Guantanamo was a monstrous injustice right from the beginning, just as it had been under the Bush administration. The need for a lawless zone — one where U.S. statutes didn’t apply — was key in Guantanamo’s selection as the site of the facility. Of all the “black sites” — the secret CIA prisons in which today’s most prominent Guantanamo prisoners were tortured for years — nowhere but Guantanamo could such a system exist in which American personnel so openly abused domestic law, international law and the civil rights of individuals.

Protests against the system were virtually unknown and always quite modest with public reaction taking place mostly under the motto: What significance do the human rights of a couple of prisoners who are probably guilty have anyway? The prevailing mood has always been that they must have been arrested for something in the global war on terror!

Aside from the efforts of human rights organizations, the prisoners have no lobby. Nobody takes their side. Nobody says, “Enough is enough!” Worse yet are the comments made in the U.S. media, where public opinion on the hunger strike runs largely along the lines of, “Let ’em starve. That solves the problems.”

America has no sense of any injustice done in Guantanamo. During the presidential campaign of 2008, when Obama announced he intended to correct injustices perpetrated by the United States like torturing prisoners and to close facilities like Guantanamo, he was immediately attacked as having no right to apologize for America.

But even more importantly: The prisoners that will not be tried must be released immediately and compensated accordingly. They have now begun pushing that point via their hunger strike. However, they won’t succeed, even if several of them starve to death. America has other priorities — especially now since the Boston bombings.