Keeping Gitmo prison open defies our highest moral values

The year after the 9/11 terrorist attacks in 2001, the prison at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba opened as an off-shore place to house people whom American military forces or intelligence services were capturing in the so-called War on Terror.

Since then more than 800 prisoners have spent time there, though the last report I saw had the current total at 30.

I have written about this moral abomination various times over the years, including this piece for USA Today in early 2021 and this blog post for this past Fourth of July about a new report by the United Nations on the catastrophe that Guantanamo continues to be.

This weekend I want to restate how appalling the whole Guantanamo story has been and, as this opinion piece from The Nation insists, why simply closing the prison -- though that's important -- won't be enough.

What has happened -- and continues to happen -- at Guantanamo in our name as Americans has been a stream of flagrant violations of basic human rights and a repudiation of almost every good thing American citizens think our country stands for -- the rule of law, basic human rights, humane treatment of prisoners, a rejection of torture as a tool and simple human decency.

In the Fourth of July blog post to which I linked you above, you'll find a link to the U.N. report written about Gitmo after the Biden administration (to its limited credit) gave a U.N. representative broad access to investigate the prison and its history. That report, discussed in detail in The Nation column, outlines in appalling detail what has happened at the prison.

The author of The Nation piece, Karen J. Greenberg, director of the Center on National Security at Fordham Law School, discusses many of the crimes and outrages that have occurred at Gitmo and the people who have been denied fundamental human rights. But she also makes the spot-on point that those prisoners have not been the only victims of the U.S. failures at the prison over the years.

Greenberg notes that the U.N. leader who wrote the recent report on Gitmo "underscores her focus on finally bringing humanity to Gitmo by arguing that the widespread abuses Americans committed over the years, including by setting up a prison offshore of American justice, also significantly impacted the families of those who were killed in the attacks of September 11, 2001."

Indeed, the prison at Guantanamo and the painfully long military commission work to try the terrorists who plotted the 9/11 attacks have been a regular source of renewed pain for 9/11 families like mine. (My nephew was a passenger on the first plane to strike the World Trade Center. I wrote about the ongoing family trauma in my latest book, Love, Loss and Endurance: A 9/11 Story of Resilience and Hope in an Age of Anxiety.)

It's not just that we have to relive Karleton's murder in media reports every Sept. 11 but that almost-daily stories about developments at Gitmo are like pin-sharp, stabbing reminders of the beautiful young man we lost and of the unconscionable actions our government has done in our name at Gitmo and before Gitmo ever opened, including the widespread use of torture.

And as Greenberg also notes, the U.N. reporter wrote that "the use of torture was 'a betrayal of the rights of victims,' too, by making the holding of trials impossible to this day and so making both accountability and closure inconceivable for the victims’ families." That's one reason some 9/11 families have formed September 11th Families for Peaceful Tomorrows as a way to work together and to support each other.

What still is needed, as Greenberg writes, is "accountability for the perpetrators and restitution for the victims." So far we have neither. So far what we mostly have is government-sponsored actions that have violated our highest values.

"Closing the prison," Greenberg writes, "if it ever actually happens, will not be enough. Sadly, even such an act will not bring true closure to the sins of America’s forever prison."

Every single presidential administration -- starting with that of George W. Bush, then Barack Obama, then Donald Trump, now Joe Biden -- has participated in these sins. And they need to end. Today.

(The A.P. photo above is from this site.)

* * *

STEAL AWAY, STEAL AWAY. . .FROM HOME DEPOT

Why does religion sometimes get a bad name, despite all the good it does? Oh, sex abuse scandals, high-flying televangelists in their own jets, theft from Home Depot. Wait. What's that last one about? As this Religion News Service story reports, a Florida pastor has been charged with leading an organized crime ring in Florida to steal more than $1.4 million in merchandise from Home Depot and reselling the haul through Robert Dell's virtual store on eBay. If that's what he allegedly practiced, wonder what he preached.

* * *

P.S.: In response to this book review that I did recently for The National Catholic Reporter (about a 103-year-old nun), I got a note from a Chicago-area deacon who is working on a book about an elderly nun in Uganda, Mother Teopista Nakuwandu. This link will take you to an interesting story about Deacon Don Grossnickle's work with her there. Read it if you need a little inspiration today.