As the clock counts down to the New Year and the
world welcomes 2016, another clock will continue ticking, counting the days,
hours, minutes and seconds since May 23, 2013, the day President Barack Obama
promised to free all those prisoners at the U.S. base at Guantanamo Bay who
have been cleared for release. That clock was created by independent journalist
Andy Worthington, and is on the Internet at gtmoclock.com. Jan. 22, will mark
the seventh anniversary of the day Obama signed Executive Order 13492, ordering
the closure of the Guantanamo Bay prison within one year. As Obama’s time in
the White House winds down, the prospects of closing the notorious gulag grow
bleaker. Currently there are 107 men imprisoned there, 48 of whom have been
cleared for release for almost six years. While the Republican-led Congress has
long thwarted efforts to close the island prison, Reuters recently reported
that the Pentagon itself, which is supposed to be under the civilian control of
Commander-in-Chief Obama, may be resisting the order to close Guantanamo.
Obama’s executive order in 2009 created the
Guantanamo Review Task Force, chaired by then Attorney General Eric Holder. It
included representatives from the departments of Justice, Defense, State, Homeland
Security, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the Joint
Chiefs of Staff. All prisoners cleared for release have received unanimous
consent from those authorities. While some of those prisoners have been
released, it shocks the conscience to think that scores of men are suffering
indefinite detention with no charges against them, many held for more than a
decade.
Tariq Ba Odah is one of those men who was cleared for
release. “He was assigned to Guantanamo in February of 2002. He’s nearing the
14-year mark of indefinite detention, nearly nine years of that time on hunger
strike and detained in solitary confinement,” his attorney, Omar Farah of the
Center for Constitutional Rights, told us on the Democracy Now! news hour. “The
president has to insist that the Department of Defense and all other agencies
fall in line behind what he says is his objective and ensure that Mr. Ba Odah
is released immediately.”
The hunger strike Farah described has reduced Tariq
Ba Odah to a shadow of his former self. “I visited Mr. Ba Odah in March and
April of this year and found him in utterly disastrous physical condition,”
Omar Farah said. “According to the government, not me, Mr. Ba Odah is just 74
and a half pounds, and that’s 56 percent of his safe body weight.” Ba Odah is
forcibly fed twice daily through a nose tube. The force with which the U.S.
military jailers insert the tube causes extreme pain, and has been deemed
torture by the United Nations Human Rights Commission.
Tariq Ba Odah is from Yemen, but, because of the
civil war there, the Obama administration will not release Yemenis directly to
their home nation. Farah told us: “There is a foreign country, a third country,
ready to accept him and help provide him medical care and rehabilitate him.
This is a person who’s desperately, desperately ill. And the last step of that
negotiated release, it seems, is the simple task of forwarding his medical
records.” The Pentagon refuses to release his medical records, citing privacy
rules. “That’s a lie. And it’s a bad lie,” Farah told us. “I sat with Mr. Ba
Odah while he provided his informed written consent to release his medical
records to me as his counsel and also for the specific purpose of negotiating
his release.”
Reuters reporters Charles Levinson and David Rohde
(the former New York Times reporter who was held captive by the Taliban in
Afghanistan for seven months, until he escaped) cite Ba Odah’s case in their
latest article, writing, “Pentagon officials have been throwing up bureaucratic
obstacles to thwart the president’s plan to close Guantanamo.”
While the Pentagon says it will release the first of
17 prisoners in January, you never know. However, what you can be sure of, like
clockwork, peace activists from Witness Against Torture, wearing orange
jumpsuits like the Guantanamo prisoners, will vigil as they do every Jan. 22 to
mark the anniversary of Obama’s executive order to close Guantanamo.
Last Thanksgiving, a delegation from Witness Against
Torture went to Cuba, within view of the U.S. base, to hold a symbolic
“Forced-Feeding, Not Feasting at Guantanamo.” They described their action:
“Twelve persons, all fasting for the day, sat at a table in front of empty
plates to represent the terrible pain endured by hunger strikers, past and present,
at Guantanamo. At the head of the table, one member dressed as a detained man
sat in front of the terrible apparatus of forced feeding.” They also wore
orange jumpsuits, and each spoke about their reasons for coming. After each
speaker, the group sang:
“Courage, Muslim brother
You do not walk alone
We will walk with you
And sing your spirit home.”
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