Telling it to the White House: Close Guantanamo

First news from yesterday's vigils marking 21 years since the first prisoners were brought to Guantanamo in 2002.

Frida Berrigan reflects below on our procession to the White House where we stood vigil during a rally with our partners. Jeremy Varon spoke at a New York City rally on "Guantanamo and Empire." And we close with a photo of Mark Colville and Martin Gugino standing vigil in Buffalo. Speak out, dear friends!

“Cause I try, and I try, and I try, and I try”
J11 Reflection by Frida Berrigan

“Guantanamo will close. It will. But it might close with the death of the last man held there.” James Yee, Former Army Muslim Chaplain to the men at Guantanamo, at a presentation to WItness Against Torture, January 10, 2023

With James Yee’s warning ringing in our ears, we suited up this morning. Pulling orange jumpsuits up over jeans or khakis or sweatpants, and pulling hoods down over hats again. For 16 years, members of Witness Against Torture have been doing this awkward set of motions. You’d think we would be accustomed to it all by now, or good at it. But it stays awkward, and maybe it should because every year we suit up with the hope that there will not be another year to come.

Our Guantanamo walk on January 11, 2023 was smaller than it has been in the past. But 15 of us in jumpsuits and hoods still cut a dramatic figure walking across Constitution Avenue. The weather was warm, our bellies were full from a quick but delicious breaking fast circle, and we were energized by the presentations we had the day before. Mansoor Adafyi, released from Guantanamo in 2016 and living alone and isolated in Serbia, shared in a zoom last night that the Witness Against Torture protests were part of what kept him going at Guantanamo: “We heard about you protesting at the White House, hunger striking and singing. And we knew that our voices were being heard, that people in the U.S. were speaking on our behalf.”

Dr Maha Hilal, author of Innocent Until Proven Muslim, calling us to deeper analysis and a rejection of false narratives and easy tropes of Guantanamo as a stain on America’s moral fabric or a recruiting tool for global jihadists. And James Yee, reminding us that someone can hold onto their morals and humanity even when deployed to what Mansoor called the “place created outside of our humanity.” Yee paid a high price for that moral fortitude.

With this wisdom in our ears, we started out on the two-mile trek to the White House, single file, our vision obscured by the hood, aided in navigation by the hardest working activists: by not donning the hoods and jumpsuits, they sign up for a tough assignment: part chaperone, part guard, part leafletter, part photographer, part police liaison, part public interpreter…

21 years into the Guantanamo prison, and 16 years into Witness Against Torture’s activism in Washington around these increasingly grim and accumulating anniversaries, and because we were a small and stalwart group, we permitted ourselves a little nostalgia. We paused at the Federal District Court, where in 2007, Witness Against Torture filled the atrium with more than 400 people and banners and signs and singing. Liz McAlister collected most people’s identification and people were arrested with the names of Guantanamo prisoners. We paused, remembering that action, the court case that followed and the friends we’ve lost since then: John Downing, presente! Jerimarie Liesegang, presente! Those are the two friends I powerfully remember from that action who are no longer with us, but there are more!

We paused again at the Department of (In)justice, recalling the action in 2011 when 60 members of Witness Against Torture blocked all the entrances calling on then Attorney General Eric Holder to release all the men from Guantanamo. Despite stopping the flow of traffic in and out of the building for the better part of two hours, the police declined to arrest anyone. In 2016, WAT ringed the DOJ with a demonstration making the connections between the police murder of Tamir Rice, a 12-year old Black boy playing in a Cleveland Park and the Islamophobia that keeps Muslim men interred at Guantanamo. One of our banners was emblazoned with “Kill White Supremacy, Not Our Children, #Justice4Tamir.''

We sang as we marched on towards the White House.

The walk seems to get longer every year, and marching along and singing under the black hood, I was definitely winded and tired by the time we reached Lafayette Park across from the White House, but there was more to our day. We were met at the park by more activists and friends, and in short order were assembled as a line of 35 figures in orange jumpsuits and black hoods, each holding the name of one of the 35 men who remain at Guantanamo. Banners with messages like “Close Guantanamo,” and “Justice for Guantanamo Survivors” lay on the ground.

The whole rally, which was short and to the point, was live streamed and can be viewed online HERE. Dr. Maha Hilal and James Yee both spoke. Chrissy Stonebreaker-Martinez led us in song. WAT organizer Herb Geraghty emceed and dealt with an array of technical difficulties and surprises with calm aplomb, including the untimely death of our sound system. Herb drew the audiences’ attention to the effort to raise money for Guantanamo Survivors Fund, to support those men who have left Guantanamo but remain in third countries, unable to work or travel or get adequate medical care.

Our “only-in-Lafayette-Park-moment” of the year occurred when Imam Saffet A. Catovic was offering a beautiful closing prayer without the benefit of a sound system just as someone out of Pennsylvania Avenue had cued up “I Can’t Get No Satisfaction,” by the Rolling Stone at a teeth shuddering volume. It was distracting and annoying, but it occurs to me that it is a good anthem for the long frustration of 21 years of Guantanamo, and 16 years of coming to the White House to mark January 11 as a Day of National Shame. Maybe not the whole song, but at least the “Cause I try, and I try, and I try, and I try” part.

Jeremy Varon's closing words as he delivered remarks in New York City yesterday:

The United States has not closed Guantanamo — perhaps it cannot close Guantanamo — because it cannot, as it currently exists, reckon with the violence, racism, and abuse that has always been part of the American project.

Closing Guantanamo, we have painfully learned, is about so much more than closing Guantanamo. It has meant confronting, against the tides of denial, the deep structures of American empire — its past and future, and the lies it tells itself.

Which means that our work is so big and so important, and that the reward even of small victories — like the next release of a man from the island prison — is so profound.

Read the entire speech at this link.

Mark Colville and Martin Gugino in Buffalo on January 11, 2023.

WAT Statement as Guantanamo Turns 21

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Who we are

Witness Against Torture was formed in 2005 when 25 Americans went to Guantánamo Bay and attempted to visit the detention facility. They began to organize more broadly to shut down Guantánamo, end indefinite detention and torture and call out Islamophobia. During our demonstrations, we lift up the words of the detainees themselves, bringing them to public spaces they are not permitted to access. Witness Against Torture will carry on in its activities until torture is decisively ended, its victims are fully acknowledged, Guantánamo and similar facilities are closed, and those who ordered and committed torture are held to account.
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