Street roots., May 10, 2013, Image 1

A personal perspective on the humanitarian crisis at Guantanamo Prison
BY MARTHA GIES
C O N T R IB U T IN G W R IT E R
Martha Gies is the
author o f “Up A ll Night"
(Oregon State University
Press, 2004), a portrait o f
Portland told through the
stories o f 21 workers on
graveyard shift. She is a
member o f St. Andrew
Bessette Parish and
serves on the editorial
advisory panel o f Street
Roots.
/ A n Sunday, March 24, in response to an
fl 1 email I’d received the day before, I quit
eating. Witness Against Torture (WAT) had
proposed a Holy Week fast in solidarity with the
detainees at Guantanamo, some of whom had been
on a hunger strike for six weeks.
I gave away the organic produce I’d just brought
home from the market, checked the date stamps
on the dairy products, and began the fast on
Passion Sunday.
The decision had been abrupt and left me with
unanswered questions: Who was still at
Guantanamo? Why were they still there? Why were
they on hunger strike now? What does it mean to
act “in solidarity?” I pondered these questions to
distract myself from hunger.
According to Andy Worthington, the British
journalist and pre-eminent Guantanamo
scorekeeper, 86 of the 166 detainees who remain
at Guantanamo have been cleared in U.S. court for
release, some as long as nine years ago. They
came from 23 different countries, with Yemen
conspicuously over-represented. The 56 Yemenites
cleared for release were not repatriated because
Yemen is deemed “unstable.”
Yemen. My ignorance is vast. My single
connection is through my Veracruz dance partner
whose Yemenite rabbi grandfather resettled in
British Palestine in 1923. Researching Yemeni
food, I discovered saltah, said to be the national
dish. A recipe from the Toronto Star uses ground
lamb, onions, potatoes in a beef broth, with lots of
spices. This was Tuesday, the third day of my fast:
Saltah sounded delicious.
Guantanamo’s detention hospital has a protocol:
Staff are required to explain the grave risks to
■Inside
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anyone who refuses food. A translator, a witness
and a medic all sign a report, testifying that the
detainee now “understands that they may
experience hunger, nausea, tiredness, feeling ill,
headaches, swelling of their extremities, muscle
wasting, abdominal pain, chest pain, irregular heart
rhythms, altered level of consciousness, organ
failure and coma.” According to the protocol,
detainees have to refuse nine consecutive meals
before they are officially recognized as hunger
strikers.
From the beginning there was controversy over
how many were participating. On Monday, March
25, Ben Fox of the Associated Press had reported
a new tally: Defense lawyers claimed as many as
100, while Navy Captain Robert Durand,
Guantanamo spokesman, acknowledged only 28,
ten of whom were being force fed with a hose
snaked up their nose in order to insert Ensure
directly to the stomach.
David H. Remes, a lawyer defending
Guantanamo detainees pro bono, explained the
hunger strike to a New York Times writer. Remes
said that while it had been triggered by rough
search and seizures of the Holy Qu’ran, in fact the
deeper underlying cause was “their frustration at
being held without trial going into their 11th year
with no end in sight.”
Wednesday night I discovered the poem by
Adnan Latif, the 37-year-old Yemini poet who
committed suicide in his cell last September, its
final stanza a mantra for the Guantanamo solidarity
movement:
Where is the world to save us from torture?
Where is the world to save us from the fire and the
darkness? Where is the world to save the hunger
strikers?
oly Week was well chosen for the solidarity
fast: Words from Psalm 22, which the lector
read at Sunday mass, haunted me throughout the
week: My God, my God, why have you forsaken
me? Why are you so far from saving me, so far
from my cries of anguish?
On Holy Thursday, the Washington Post ran a
guest editorial by Thomas Wilner who was the
lawyer in a 2008 case heard by the Supreme Court
that established the right to habeas corpus for his
client, a Guantanamo detainee. Wilner pointed out
that fewer than 20 of the current prisoners were
“high value.” The others, he described as “low-
level functionaries or people swept up and sold for
bounties in the confusing initial stages of the fog of
war in Afghanistan.”
Reading Wilner’s words on Holy Thursday, at
least one connection was easy to draw: by
midnight, even Jesus had been sold for 30 pieces of
silver.
On Good Friday, I found the letter from Kenneth
Roth, Director of Human Rights Watch, to Defense
Secretary Charles Hagel, in which Roth addressed
one of the most troublesome aspects of this
ongoing scandal: “The indefinite detention of
individuals without trial at Guantanamo has been
in violation of international law. The lawful course
for dealing with these detainees is to either
prosecute them or release them.”
He might have added the words of Dr. Martin
Luther King Jr., written from the Birmingham Jail
50 years ago this spring: “Justice too long delayed
is justice denied.”
Throughout my fast, I struggled with the notion
of “solidarity.” What can it mean if an act is
undertaken invisibly, in solitude?
H
See GUANTANAMO, page 4
? gg^g
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B
with musician
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i '
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