an anniversary

January 11 marks the 6th anniversary of the first prisoners taken to Guantanamo. For six years our country has imprisoned people indefinitely without charges. Those imprisoned haven’t seen family and have repeatedly been denied access to lawyers. The Military Commissions Act ensures those imprisoned are denied habeas corpus.

I sicken when I hear names like Auschwitz, Andersonville, Kolyma, Buchenwald. Will we have to add the name Guantanamo to this list?

It’s not the first U.S. internment camp—best known are the WWII “relocation” camps, when Japanese, German, and Italian-Americans were rounded up and imprisoned. However, before that, there were places like Fort Cass, and a whole host of other prison camps, used to imprison Native people as the U.S. carried out its genocidal policies. In 1901, in the province of Batangas, the U.S. again established internment camps, resulting in the deaths of up to 100,000 Filipinos. The U.S. military used what was called the “water cure” during interrogation and torture of Filipinos. Today, the U.S. straps the prisoner down and calls it waterboarding.

The realities of Guantanamo are enormously significant. We’re maintaining a prison camp, imprisoning individuals indefinitely and without charges. The torture of human beings has become synonymous with the U.S. Guantanamo prison camp. How long will this continue? How far along the path of fascism, torture, and atrocity will we go? When will we demand an end to policies the likes of which have been embraced by Nazi Germany, Gulag Russia, and our own imperialist past?