Just Following Orders at Guantanamo

Dear Mr. President,

An article published on the New England Journal of Medicine’s website Wednesday urges Navy doctors at Guantanamo to mutiny and stop force-feeding hunger strikers, calling it “aggressive assault.” In response, Navy Captain Robert Durand said, “People follow lawful orders. It’s Department of Defense policy to preserve life through lawful means.” (Miami Herald, “Doctors of hunger-strike detainees urged to mutiny”, June 13, 2013) Military policy is to preserve life? Really? “Just following orders” is the standard response of all those complicit in torture, murder and brutality. That excuse didn’t work for the Nazis at Nuremburg and it is no more valid now than it was then. 104 prisoners in the American Gulag of Guantanamo are now officially classified hunger strikers; 43 are force-fed. This doesn’t include 14 CIA prisoners in the top-secret Camp 7—Capt. Durand is “forbidden” to include them in the count. Are they too, on a hunger strike? Force-fed? A mutiny by Guantanamo doctors would be, at the very least, moral and ethical. “Just following orders” was an inadequate defense at Nuremburg; the orders being followed were ruled unlawful. Force-feeding at Guantanamo has been ruled torture and condemned by the World Medical Association, the UN, the AMA and medical groups around the world. You are on the wrong side of history, Mr. President, the wrong side of ethics, the wrong side of morality, the wrong side of humanity. You embraced not only Bush the Lesser’s Global War of Terror but the lawlessness of his neocon administration and their dream of Empire. You have taken suppression of whistle-blowers to new extremes, the lack of transparency to levels unimagined a decade ago, and made war acceptable foreign policy. Meanwhile, the harpies in Congress spread fear and ignorance, support your murderous wars of aggression, and willingly implement a police state where everyone is watched and no one is free, where inequality is accepted as normal and doublethink is perceived as logical truth. You have betrayed not only We the People, but millions around the world who believed your promises of Hope, Change and the restoration of justice. Four and a half years later we have a world more unjust, more violent and more unequal, a world rampant with fear and hatred, a world of Kill Lists, targeted assassinations and indefinite detention, a world of rich and poor and no in-between. Welcome to Obama’s world where even starving for justice is no longer allowed.