Guantanamo Bay has come to represent an unthinkable level of state violence gone global, where laws are suspended and “exceptional” rules are used to justify torture and degradation by the state. As people committed to social justice, we join our voices to the demand to shut down Guantanamo Bay and to dismantle the structures that make it possible!
In the name of fighting an endless war against a endlessly expanding “enemy”, the US government has created the experiment in captivity known as Guantanamo Bay. But this experiment is not as new as we think. Indefinite, preemptive detention outside the provisions of the law far predates the War on Terror; in the US, it is a systemic reality in the form of the “immigrant detention” system. It was immigrants deemed as “deportable” who were held in Guantanamo before the war on terror — specifically Haitian refugees in the 1990s who were intercepted at sea, held captive in unspeakable conditions; only the very few deemed economically useful to the US were released, while others were exposed to prolonged detention outside the provisions of international law or the domestic criminal justice system. This is possible because in the United States the detention of immigrants is a form of captivity that legally considered to be “not imprisonment”. Therefore people who are not US citizens can be locked up preemptively in a parallel prison system that is invisible to the law and to public oversight, and is exempt for any requirements of due process.
The War on Terror, as well as the war on drugs and the war on crime, have been used to designate certain categories of people as disposable, as scapegoats, as lives worth less. These categories are called terrorist and illegal, but they are also called Black, they are called poor, they are called criminal. While those deemed “illegal” and “terrorist” are excluded from the law; others are included into the status of citizen, but they become effectively excluded through criminalization and incarceration. The legal and juridical system, its oppression and violence hidden in plain sight, creates and perpetuates systems of racial and economic inequality that function like caste systems.
We renew our solidarity with efforts to shut down Guantanamo Bay and to abolish the political and legal frameworks that make such a place possible. We renew our commitment to resisting state and corporate domination, and to revealing the interlocking nature of local and global injustices.
No Name Collective
Moratorium on Deportations Campaign (MDC)
Undocumented Resilient & Organized (URO)
Occupy El Barrio
NATO 5 Defense Committee
Nancy L Cowger
South Chicago ABC Zine Distro
Pax Christi Seed Planter
Yazmin Nair, Chicago
If you would like to add your name as co-signer, as an individual or organization, please send an email by Friday morning, Jan 11 to: