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We are here to say CLOSE GUANTANAMO. Close it now.
It never should have been opened.
It was opened only to get around the law of the USA, the Constitution of the United States, the Geneva Convention.

It stands as a symbol of our illegal use of torture.
Torture is waterboarding; but it is more than waterboarding. Torture produces physical pain, psychological pain, mental pain.
It does so on purpose.

It operates on the assumption that torture will produce truth.
But professionals tell us it delivers inventive lies instead.
We non-professions have figured that out by ourselves.

Operators claim they torture to save innocent American victims from future bomb attacks and their concomitant pain; but in fact many operators fall into the pit of using torture to cover-up their urge for revenge.
Operators in this war claim the destruction of four thousand on 9/11 was so great that the USA has the right to discontinue the Geneva agreements, the Catholic Church’s Just War theses, and United Nations Security Council decisions.
When we torture to prevent pain, we forget that the war we started has so far resulted in the deaths, injuries, sorrows and sufferings of hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqi victims.
Are our four thousand more human than the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi victims?
We forget the 50 million who died in World War II. Out of that cataclysm, the United Nations was created, the Geneva agreements and international courts and treaties greatly strengthened. These were to save the world from torture.
All of these efforts at peace building have been throttled. They have been replaced by secret prisons where the International Red Cross is not permitted, and known prisons where the International Red Cross dare not make its reports public.

Torture makes reconciliation all that more difficult.
Torture makes peace all that more impossible.

Torture tries to mask the fact that every person is a human being.
Individuals are put in chains, colored suits, hoods, mocked, hobbled, disrespected, degraded, so that we the public will be convinced they are less than human.

We have seen this before in our country. In the 18th and 19th centuries slaves were paraded before the nation’s capital hooked together in chains, in long claques, from auction-houses to the killing fields of cottonfields in the deep South. We were told then that they were less than human.

Of the 775 males aged 13 to 98 subjected to cruel, degrading, inhuman treatment in our prisons—named and unnamed, known and secret—how many of them were less than human?

Omar Deghayes grew up in Brighton, England, studied the law, in 2001 traveled, married in Afghanistan, had a son. When the Taliban began fighting, he fled to Pakistan and made plans to return to England, but was arrested for a bounty of $5,000, and sent to Guantanamo. There he was repeatedly beaten and kept in solitary confinement and lost the sight of one eye. Standing at the gates of Guantanamo, his mother broke down. “It breaks my heart to think of my son in a cramped narrow cell without sunshine or fresh air, living for so many years in conditions not even fit for animals,” she cried.

Among the hundreds of men imprisoned … a self-described Pakistani villager says he was arrested at his modest home in Jan. 2002, flown off to Afghanistan and later accused of being the deputy foreign minister of that country’s deposed Taliban region. “I am only a chicken farmer…” he insisted. My name is Abdur Sayed Rahman. Abdur ZAHID Rahman was the deputy foreign minister of the Taliban.” I am not he!

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