Swan’s Shadow

The most zealous defender of international law, that certifies or censures other countries for their human rights records, has maintained a concentration camp for the past 10 years. Seven hundred ninety-nine prisoners have passed through this facility, out of which five committed suicide, and there remain today 117 men who are, as Rob Freer of Amnesty International stated, “under arbitrary and indefinite detention, without conviction or due process.”

Guantanamo today is a symbol of many things: the persistence of colonialism (through the willful possession of a territory, whose sovereignty is widely recognized despite the claims of the occupier); the persistence of a country to openly act outside of the law; the use of psychological and physical torture to obtain confessions from prisoners; and the violation of the legal right to a defense and a trial before a jury. And it is also a symbol of the power of certain political sectors in the United States to impose their will on the majority. No one can forget that Barack Obama, elected as president three years ago, promised from the start to close this dishonorable prison, and that the Republican opposition and other powerful interests have constantly thwarted this attempt. Guantanamo is for most also a symbol of the president’s limitations in the most powerful country in the world.

They say that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. The United States has exercised in the past seventy years its power over a good part of the world, and now as a consequence many fatal corruptions are becoming visible. There are conspiracies to overthrow legitimate governments like Salvador Allende’s in Chile; schools for training military forces of other countries in practices of dubious legality; invasions like that of Grenada which the United States prefers to call “interventions”; notorious and unjustified wars like in Iraq; and the capturing and trafficking of prisoners that could legally be classified as kidnapping.

All this is accompanied by the exalted preaching that people have to accept all these doses of hell because they are made for the people’s salvation. Also for the salvation of humanity the Catholic Church instituted for centuries the court of the Inquisition, which desecrated and outraged the human condition for the sake of the highest principles.

There is a verse by Victor Hugo that Paul Valery considered the most beautiful verse of French poetry: L’ombre est noire toujours même en tombant des cignes (Shadows are always black, even when shed by swans). Hugo was alluding to the crimes of Christians, who justified their actions against all evidence by invoking the name of Christ. This is what should be said to the apostles of democracy and the country of freedom that has permitted for 10 years the existence of a torture camp ungoverned by the laws of any country. In the 116 square kilometers that make up the U.S. naval base at the entrance of Guantanamo Bay in eastern Cuba, prisoners can be kept in any condition and be subject to any deal without the intervention of courts.

It seems that the U.S. courts have stated that they have failed to act concerning the prisoners in Guantanamo because in actuality the bay is not part of the United States. The U.S. government is paying rent to the Cuban government, which has sovereignty over this territory. But for the past 50 years, Cuba has refused the annual rent of $4,900 that was agreed upon 110 years ago, and has long since demanded that the U.S. leave the bay.

Do we not have here a typical legal ruse? Though the soil on which it stands is not U.S. territory, can the courts deny that Guantanamo is a U.S. naval base, that the ships entering and leaving are part of the U.S. Navy and Air Force, or that the personnel that work there belong to the army of the same country?

Are these individuals not subject to the laws of the United States in any location in the world? The humiliation of prisoners, the denial of their rights, the torture: are these not punishable acts by soldiers of the most powerful army of the world? What farce is this? And the duty to treat human beings as such, with dignity and rights, does it not apply in prisons under the control of the United States? Does the U.S. Constitution tolerate that outside of the battlefield, its own soldiers live without being subject to the law?

The United States cannot maintain its concentration camp in front of the eyes of mankind after declaring itself a nation of rights. Not to comply with the promise of Barack Obama is for the United States to declare itself an official violator of human rights and to disqualify itself from speaking on this subject.

Why do the great leaders of the West not protest? Why don’t France and the United Kingdom intervene? And when will the model be perfect? When the French have concentration camps in Reunión and Guadalupe? When the English have torture camps in Gibraltar or in the Malvinas? When the United States opens its first Hell on the moon?