Guantanamo, the Name of Betrayal

“It is inefficient, it hurts us in terms of our international standing, it lessens cooperation with our allies on counterterrorism efforts, it is a recruitment tool for extremists, it needs to be closed,” explained Barack Obama, concluding on a definite point: “It is contrary to who we are.” The American president was referring to the Guantanamo prison, where around 100 to 166 detainees are holding a hunger strike, started by some of them more than two months ago. He did not say this, of course, but Guantanamo is also the name of betrayal: a sign of the compromise of principles dishonored by Obama himself.

The promise to close the offshore prison was solemnly proclaimed in the first presidential campaign in 2008. In the second month of his first term, Obama signed an executive order to close it, but he faced ferocious bipartisan resistance in Congress. Congressmen cut the funds needed to transfer prisoners and adopted various measures to avoid sending them anywhere else. The president had the alternatives of vetoing congressional decisions or using executive prerogative to circumvent them, but he preferred to give in. Now, when he says again that Guantanamo “is contrary to who we are,” he can invoke history and the Constitution to obscure a political consensus which, shamefully, links his government with that of George W. Bush.

Bush, his Vice President Dick Cheney and his Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld created an illegal prison in the course of a “war on terror” that also blurred the signature of successive American presidents on the international laws against torture. Obama promised to restore the principle that separates civilization from barbarism and, in fact, proscribed the dehumanizing interrogation techniques applied in the dark years of his predecessor. Today, however, a score of Guantanamo prisoners are being submitted to techniques of force-feeding that violate their individual rights and are, for all purposes, equivalent to torture. In the expression “who we are” is contained an aspiration to eternity. However, nations change, and even their most sacred principles are subject to merciless erosion caused by continued betrayal.

Guantanamo is the synthesis of the judicial barbarism generated by the “war on terror.” With investigations finished, there is no remaining charge for 86 detainees. Many of them should have been freed years ago, but they remain incarcerated, since under allegations of “national security” Congress prohibited their liberation on American soil as well as repatriation to their countries of origin. Worse, by congressional decision, they cannot be tried in civil courts, but they also cannot be judged by the “military commissions” invented in the Rumsfeld era, whose work was interrupted when their proceedings were shown to be unsustainably illegal. The hunger strike of the forgotten prisoners, these human remains of years of fury, represents, objectively, a gesture in defense of individual liberty and the rule of law. “Who we are”: Right now, the bearded face of Islamic detainees in Guantanamo forms an exact image of the principles written in the founding texts of the United States.

The fundamental values, “who we are,” should not be weighed on the scale of utilitarian interests. But Obama is right to underline the “inefficiency” of Guantanamo, especially against the backdrop of the attempted terrorist attacks in Boston. Dzokhar Tsarnaev invoked Afghanistan and Iraq as motivations for the carnage planned by the two brothers. Terrorists will always have pretexts to blow up innocent people. In the end, the vocabulary of extremists does not need more than words such as “imperialism,” “capitalism” or “Jews.” However, nothing can be compared to the persuasive force of the truth: The images of Guantanamo prisoners, those emaciated signs of a power that does not recognize the limits of the law, are a more efficient “weapon of recruitment” than any discourse produced in the jihadist factory of hatred.

Guantanamo “hurts us in terms of our international standing.” That’s true, and more: Guantanamo damages the fight for human rights and for civil liberties the world over. Following a sad tradition of the Lula government, Dilma Rousseff mentioned the name of the offshore prison on her visit to Cuba in the beginning of 2012, as a pretext for silence over the death of a political prisoner in a hunger strike on the island of her dictator friends. The name worked like a magic signal, a secret handshake for the “fellow travelers” of tyranny. It was in the infamous dossier prepared by the Cuban Embassy in Brazil against Yoani Sanchez and was repeated like a mantra by those who were trying to hide their voice behind insulting shouts. It emerged with ritual regularity in the speeches of Chavista leaders who threatened to lock up opposition and close organs of the press.

Obama articulates perfectly the immense wrongs caused by the prison at Guantanamo, but still vacillates on the imperative to close it. As an editorial in The Economist explained, the blackmail of the “bullies and cowards” who commanded Bush’s anti-terror policy consists of pointing out the risks of freeing terrorism suspects imprisoned without charge. The myth of the ticking time bomb is the classic argument of torture advocates. The response to this faction by heralds of the violations of human rights should be clear and direct: Much worse than the hypothetical threat of violence represented by these particular individuals is the demoralization of the philosophical pillars that sustain liberties and rights.

Guantanamo is a triumph of jihadists and tyrants. If the American president wants to save “who we are,” he has the obligation to finally keep his campaign promise.