Samir Naji Al Hasan Moqbel: A Cry For Humanity

Dear Mr. President,
Samir Naji Al Hasan Moqbel has been in Guantanamo for 11 years. He, along with more than half of his fellow 165 prisoners, was cleared for release years ago but because of politics and politicians, still languishes in America’s version of the notorious French penal colony, Devil’s Island. That the NYT published an op-ed piece by him today is a miracle. That he was allowed to dictate it through an interpreter to his lawyer over the phone, another miracle. He claims to be innocent, not a terrorist or militant, simply looking for work in Afghanistan when the U.S. invaded, fled to Pakistan and, in a Kafkaesque nightmare, turned over to Americans and flown to Guantanamo. We’ll never know if he’s innocent or guilty since no charges were ever made, no proof of guilt provided and no trial will ever be held. He’s an “enemy combatant,” a classification invented by politicians to do away with all rights, both human and legal. This is the new rule of law instituted by Bush and institutionalized by you—that a person is guilty until proven innocent and subject to indefinite detention without legal recourse. It is the mark of petty tyrants who make up arbitrary and secret rules to retain power and feed fantasies of immortality and omniscience. Mr. Moqbel’s op-ed piece is a visceral experience of the brutality of this hellhole and what it feels like to be force-fed, to be tied hand and foot to a chair by guards in full riot gear, to have your head strapped down, a plastic tube threaded through your nose, down your throat and into your stomach. You want to vomit, he says, but you can’t. The pain is intense, unremitting. It is, as the UN declared, torture. Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, the CIA gulag of torture chambers, there is little difference. They are all the byproducts of war, ugly, brutal and senseless. War is the triumph of evil over morality, of cruelty over compassion, of ignorance over wisdom. It is reflected in the online comments to Mr. Moqbel’s plight. America has suffered from the one-two punch of Bush and Obama. The two of you have launched a reign of terror and unending war and Mr. Moqbel is one of its many victims. You vowed to close Guantanamo but you didn’t. You abandoned Samir Naji Al Hasan Moqbel to die there even though he should have been released years ago. We have indeed gone to the Dark Side as Cheney called it, a world where there is no justice and no hope, only cruelty and unending violence and no Nobel Peace Prize will change that.