(@8 – promoted by buhdydharma )
You are not in Cuba. You are not in the U.S.
You are not in the law.
You are nothing but the law. Not the law as vehicle of justice, but law as the articulation of brute power.
People turn away from GITMO because it reveals the violence that ultimately grants the law its authority, its power.
You are in Cuba. You are not in Cuba.
You are in the U.S. You are not in the U.S.
So where are the men, the 100s of men, being held in a cage mostly without charge, without hope, subject to brutalizing deprivations and abuse, yes, torture, where are they?
They are in a place where iguanas are protected by U.S. law, but prisoners are not. 
What would the iguanas say if they could? What have they seen in the cage?
SCOTUS is hearing two cases, a flicker of hope for the detainees and habeas corpus. Justice Kennedy, putative swing vote, is inclined to think that GITMO is in the U.S. How will the justices rule?
GITMO: Where are you?
Where are your detainees?
They are not in Cuba. They are not in the U.S. They are not in the law, but they are nothing but the law’s target of power, nothing but a body subject to law’s violent, lawless grip.
They are in a place where hanging oneself is considered warfare, where even the relationship with their attorneys is not private, a place where hope is deprived of air as the inmates are deprived of necessary contact.
GITMO: Where are you?
Where are the men that are confined to a death in life there? They are in the hearts and thoughts of their loved ones, who are also condemned to a suffering without limit. They are in our hearts and minds too and our petitions to our government. They are being carried by thousands working tirelessly to bring them into the fold of possible justice, that is, into humanity recognized as such.
Many of you have probably read the slim, but potent volume Poems from Guantanamo: The Detainees Speak.
It would make a sober but significant gift this season–to remind us all what peace and fellowship on earth would actually mean.
These poems are an appeal for action, a crucial insistence upon the humanity of their authors. These poems may literally help the detainees survive; composing poems you can keep some composure of mind, maintain the coherence that keeps you you.
Siddiq Turkestani. A 33 year old ethnic Uighur from Saudi Arabia was traveling in Afghanistan when he was captured and tortured by Al Qaeda and imprisoned by the Taliban in Khandahar until U.S. intelligence visited the jail. “He told them his story and was promised quick release. Instead, he was eventually sent to Guantanamo and held for four years on accusations that included being associated with the Taliban and al Qaeda (associations, indeed! if you include being subject to abduction, torture, and imprisonment in the notion of association!-srkp23). The military determined that he was not an enemy combatant in January 2005 and he was released from Guatanamo nearly six months later.” (Poems, p.67)
Here is Siddiq’s poem:
Even if the pain of the wound increases,
There must be a remedy to treat it.Even if the days in prison endure,
There must be a day when we will get out.
We, we the poems, we, we the men, will get out. Dead or alive. Let the poem live. Let us live.
When we read the poems we take in an entrusted responsibility to read, to witness, to circulate, to act.
Ariel Dorfman closes the volume with two plaintive paragraphs powerfully intoning this entrusted responsibility:
Think of the prisoners, breathing in and out those words, close by an ocean they can hear nearby but never see and never touch. Think of them, now represented to their faraway foes by words of fire and sorrow, asking us to listen, to acknowledge the buried flame of their existence. Think that we have a chance to help them complete their journey that started in a cage in a concentration camp, merely by something something as simple as reading these poems. Think that perhaps someday, perhaps soon, if we care enough, if we are troubled enough, it will not be just the verses that are set free to roam the world but the hands and lips and lungs that compose them.
Until that day arrives, their true home, rather than the infamous detention center at Guantanamo Bay, will be the bitter poems they have written against loneliness and death.
And reading the poems, they take up residence in us. Let us remember them and advocate for them until they are brought into the arm of law as justice and fairly charged and tried and/or released.
How We Can Help
This gift giving season and beyond, let’s support the incredible efforts of the following organizations that are working tirelessly on behalf of the detainees. We can support them with our time and money.
Center for Constitutional Rights
- Learn all about their work fighting for the rights of detainees.
- CCR is flooding the Oval Office with the Constitution this holiday season. Have one sent in your name here.
- Donate.
- Action center.
- AI has an incredible campaign to Close Guantanamo.
- Donate.
- Top Ten Things You Can Do to Help Close Guantanamo
Don’t let the detainees from Guantanamo fade from memory. Call your Congresscritters and just talk to folks too.
Justice, where are you?
No justice, no peace.
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GITMO must be in each and every one of us and we must speak for justice.
Thanks for reading.
That Gitmo is outside the law is a joke. As is the myth of American morality as long as it is open.
Thanks skrpy!
the outrage if Americans were being tortured at a facility that had no accountability, where those housed there were denied access to legal representation, and were made to be invisible.
I don’t know how Americans cannot be ashamed that it even exists, it certainly hold up a mirror to our worst hypocrisies.
… no peace.
Travesty, as in, mockery, perversion, sham, distortion.
…not Cuba. A leased-in-perpetuity, jurisdictionless no-man’s land. A land without a country run by men without a conscience.
Kudos on this Diary.
Where is the edge of my existence?
Where is justice?
When I listen
When I hear you
I also in my comfortable existence
Am at least temporarily freed.
Yet there is more to do.