Communist Workers Group (CWG-USA)

Guantanamo Hunger Strike: Criminal US Military Torture of Detainees

 
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A week after detainees at Guantanamo Bay prison camp were forced from the largest communal area into single cells, nearly half of them are currently on a hunger strike.  Seventeen of them are having nutrition drink pumped into their stomachs and the military’s Muslim adviser stated on April 18^th that the hunger strike will lead to multiple deaths.  The hunger strike spread after authorities injured five inmates in a raid on April 13^th on the communal area and forced detainees into individual cells. The justification for the raid was ostensibly to prevent the detainees from covering cameras.   The hunger strike, thought to have begun on 6 February, is in protest against not only this raid, but for 11 year incarceration without charge or trial, as well as torture.

            “They used dogs on us, they beat me, sometimes they hung me from the ceiling and didn’t allow me to sleep for six days.” said Al Jazeera journalist Sami al-Haj. He spent 6 years at Guantanamo. Al Jazeera reported that Brandon Neely, a US Military Policeman and former Guantanamo guard, said that detainees were “treated horribly’ and that he regularly watched detainees being beaten and humiliated.  The criminal torture of the Guantanamo detainees under the Obama administration is a continuation of the Bush administrations “War on Terror” in the aftermath of 9/11 in violation of US Laws and international treaties.  As a new report released by the bipartisan Constitution Project stated:

 “Perhaps the most important or notable finding of this panel is that it is indisputable that the United States engaged in the practice of torture.”

 Democrats and their AFL-CIO leadership friends wish you would forget that Obama promised to close Guantanamo exactly because of the human rights abuses, when he ran for office in 2008.

 US imperialism has proven itself over and over again as the world’s biggest terrorist and threat to humanity.  From Hiroshima to My Lai to the devastation of the Iraq and Afghan Wars, American capitalism has left in its wake devastation and death.  As the Obama administration conducts drone strikes abroad, the racist US cops wage a virtual war against the Black, Brown and immigrant communities at home as every 28 hours a Black person is killed by the cops.  And the Obama administration has deported immigrants in record numbers.  Recently police torture in Chicago has been prominent in the press (see “Two Decades of Police Torture in Chicago” in this issue of Class War).

 It is high time the working class of the United States, North America and the world unite and fight to end this injustice and create a humane world.  We need to rally behind a revolutionary program of socialism in revolutionary workers parties to abolish capitalism once and for all.

 Close down Guantanamo Bay prison torture facilities!  Free the detainees!

 Return Guantanamo to Cuba!

http://www.aljazeera.com/news/americas/2013/04/201342172239565373.html

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/04/18/guantanamo-hunger-strike-deaths_n_3110642.html

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/04/20/guantanamo-hunger-strike_n_3123554.html

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/04/14/british-prisoner-describes-hunger-strikes-people-are-dying-in-guantanamo-bay/

http://news.yahoo.com/obamas-guantanamo-policy-hit-violence-force-feeding-003214010.html

http://ccrjustice.org/files/Report_ReportOnTorture.pdf]

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/04/16/harry-reid-guantanamo-bay_n_3094881.html