Guantánamo Hunger Strike: Free the Detainees Now!

The following article is reprinted from Workers Vanguard No. 1022, 19 April, newspaper of the Spartacist League/U.S.

APRIL 15—A mass hunger strike at the U.S. military’s Guantánamo detention center in Cuba is now in its third month. Precipitated by a raid in February during which prisoners’ Korans were desecrated, the hunger strike includes a number of men who are near death as they protest being consigned to endless incarceration in the prison’s notorious torture chambers. Lawyers for the detainees report that some 130 prisoners are participating in the hunger strike, with the military force-feeding 13 of them. As one striker told attorney David Remes, detainees “feel like they’re living in graves” (Al Jazeera, 19 March). There has been at least one attempted suicide as well as reports of prisoners coughing up blood and others hospitalized for dehydration. On April 13, shortly after a Red Cross delegation investigating the strike had left the camp, guards fired “non-lethal” rounds at prisoners who resisted being forcibly moved to single-cell lockups. In another display of cruelty, a federal judge today dismissed an emergency motion from a hunger striker that sought an end to the mistreatment, sneering that the prisoner had “self-manufactured” his condition.

The hunger strike is a cry of despair over the legal limbo that detainees have suffered under since U.S. imperialism launched its “war on terror” following the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. As the U.S./NATO began its murderous occupation of Afghanistan, hundreds of detainees were incarcerated indefinitely without a shred of legal rights. Of the 166 men still imprisoned at Guantánamo, 86 were cleared for release years ago. Most of the remaining 80 have not been charged with any crime, and only 30 detainees are subjects of active “investigations.”

A March 14 letter to Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel by detainees’ attorneys described the prisoners as “feeling hopeless in the face of 11 years of detention without prospect of release or trial and the continuing inability of the political branches to carry through on their commitment to close the prison in a just manner” (ccrjustice.org). It is not only that Barack Obama has reneged on his 2008 campaign pledge to close Guantánamo. The letter reports “a background of increasingly regressive practices at the prison taking place in recent months,” described by prisoners as a return to conditions in the Bush era that were widely recognized as constituting torture.

Hunger striker Shaker Aamer is one of those who have been held since 2002, never charged, never tried or convicted, cleared to go home but still in detention despite protest from the government of Britain, where his family resides. In a statement published in the New Statesman (5 April), Aamer describes the plight of Yemeni detainee Abu Bakr, a/k/a “171,” who has been on hunger strike since 2005 and has now become a special target of the prison administrator: “Back in October, 171 was tied in the feeding chair, and just left there for 52 hours. Then, from 4 January, he was isolated for a full month.... He thinks they’ll kill him off, to encourage the others to give up their strike.”

In an op-ed piece in the New York Times (14 April), another Yemeni hunger striker, Samir Naji al Hasan Moqbel, movingly recounted his ordeal, not least the excruciating pain of the force-feedings. Moqbel observed: “The only reason I am still here is that President Obama refuses to send any detainees back to Yemen.” Indeed, the U.S. president in early 2010 halted the repatriation of detainees to Yemen under the pretext of “current security conditions” in that country. Today, a majority of the remaining Guantánamo detainees are Yemeni nationals. With the detentions provoking protests in Yemen, its president, who has given his unqualified blessing to the U.S. campaign of terror-by-drone in Yemen, felt compelled to intone: “We believe that keeping someone in prison for over ten years without due process is clear-cut tyranny.”

Whereas the Bush administration rounded up hundreds of men (some under 18 years old) and tossed them into the CIA secret prison and rendition network, the Obama White House has preferred to simply kill its targets, mainly through drone strikes. At the same time, under Obama’s plan to shutter Guantánamo, the system of indefinite detention would have continued, simply relocated onto American soil. But with Congress working to ensure that Guantánamo remain a detention center, the military’s Southern Command has requested up to $170 million to upgrade existing facilities and an additional $49 million for a new prison building to hold “special” detainees.

Meanwhile, the Obama administration cynically paints the force-feeding of prisoners—officially recognized by the United Nations and others as a form of torture—as supposedly protecting their safety and welfare. This was too much even for the Obama-friendly New York Times, which ran a 5 April editorial declaring that “the truly humane response to this crisis is to free prisoners who have been approved for release, end indefinite detention and close the prison at Guantánamo.” For such bourgeois liberals, Guantánamo stains the veneer of “democracy” with which America’s capitalist rulers cover their depredations around the world.

As revolutionary proletarian opponents of imperialism, we call for closing Guantánamo as well as for the release of all the remaining detainees, despite the enormous gulf between our Marxist worldview and that of the reactionary Islamist forces that the detainees are alleged to support. Our program is not that of liberal reformers who seek to perfect the mechanisms of imperialist rule by cleaning up its “excesses.” Our fight is to mobilize the working class in opposition to imperialist wars and occupations and in defense of all the exploited and oppressed, a struggle that must culminate in proletarian revolution to destroy the imperialists’ machinery of state terror once and for all.