Kafka's Hell

Dear Mr. President,
The military now admits that 103 prisoners at Guantanamo are officially on a hunger strike; 30 are being force-fed. It’s 103 days since the hunger strike began—103 prisoners, 103 days. Last week Holder said your ban on releasing 56 Yemeni prisoners was “under review.” You’ve done squat to close Guantanamo for 4½ years so you’ll probably “review” the Yemeni situation until you skate out in 2015. Guantanamo is yours now. Bush started it but the hunger strikers made it yours. The more I read about how these men came to be in Guantanamo, the uglier it gets. Many were turned in for the $5,000 bounty, a lot of money for an impoverished Pakistani or Afghan villager; enough to support them and their families the rest of their lives. Guilt or innocence? It turns out not to matter; guilt by association, by unsubstantiated accusation, by confession under torture is enough. And once you’re in the grip or on the list of the U.S. military/intelligence/CIA community, your goose is cooked; you’ll never get out of Kafka’s hell. Those prisoners have lost all hope; they want to die rather than suffer the endless injustice of Guantanamo. Force-feeding is just another in a long history of torture and abuse at Guantanamo: rubber-coated bullets, beatings, threats of rape, isolation, freezing cold, the humiliation and brutality is endless. The crazies in Congress don’t care about justice—“they deserve whatever they get.” Well, maybe they do and maybe they don’t. Nobody knows for sure since there’s no charges, no evidence and no trials. That’s where you come in. You, the big-shot Constitutional law professor, the Nobel Peace Prize winner. You know that 500 terrorists have been tried in civilian courts and 89% convicted, but apparently you couldn’t care less. Justice? The Constitution? Human rights? Eh! Just don’t let those suckers die on my watch. So you send 40 more nurses and doctors to force-feed the strikers. That’s as humanitarian as your butchery in Libya and your “justice” in assassinating bin Laden and dumping his body at sea. The UN calls force-feeding torture. The AMA calls it unethical and inhuman. I call it part of your legacy. A legacy of shame and sellout, a betrayal of everything you promised, especially a return to the rule of law. What have you given us instead? According to William Binney—an ex-NSA official—a nation “that far from a turnkey totalitarian state.” He was holding his thumb and forefinger close together. Your legacy, Mr. President.