We urge you join us in a nationwide campaign and petition drive to shut down the Guantanamo Bay Detention Facility. The campaign is a project of the A.N.S.W.E.R. Coalition and VoteNoWar. Org which was the largest grassroots peoples referendum opposing the launch of the Iraq war. The goal of the campaign is to ignite a mass movement of the people of the United States and around the world to close Guantanamo and all the secret prisons and torture centers set up around the world by the Bush administration. Each and every official must be held accountable for their criminal conduct from Bush and Cheney to Rumsfeld and General Geoffrey Miller.
We will be gathering hundreds of thousands of names on the “Shut It Down” petition. We will flood Congress with emails, faxes and phone calls. We will be launching a mass education campaign in the mainstream media, and in the alternative media. With your help we will be placing newspaper ads around the country. We will be coalescing with organizations and movements who focus on civil rights, legal rights, faith-based and student communities, and within the labor movement. This is an issue that affects everyone.
As someone who has been active in and supporting the anti-war movement you are well aware that the most important counter-weight to the Bush Administration’s criminal policies has been the creation of a global progressive movement. Millions of people have been in the streets in countless demonstrations in the past few years. Now Bush’s approval ratings have dropped to 29% and the anti-war movement’s political position has been proven to be correct. But unless we act now, and help the rest of the country join in this movement, the criminals in the White House will continue on their path.
UN Panel says: Shut Down Guantanamo Now!
The United Nations panel investigating conditions at Guantanamo insisted in a report released on May 19, 2006 that the prison must be shut down. The UN panel declared the prison to be a torture facility. Unless they are charged and given a fair trial, the report also called for the release of the hundreds of prisoners at Guantanamo who are being held indefinitely. Without criminal charges, these prisoners are held in savage conditions and subjected to physical and psychological abuse, including the much vaunted innovations of “cultural” and sexual humiliation.
The UN report did not limit itself to demanding the closing of Guantanamo. It also called for the closure of secret CIA prisons, and the end of the “extraordinary renditions” which is the policy of the US government shipping people to other countries so that they can be more effectively tortured.
This torture center must be closed. The people of the United States should join the people of Cuba and the people of the world in demanding that the entire U.S. Naval Base in Guantanamo Cuba be closed down. The U.S. invaded Cuba in 1898 and forced the colonial government of that time to sign a treaty giving the U.S. military control over this part of the island of Cuba in perpetuity. The continued maintenance of a U.S. Naval Base inside of Cuba against the wishes of the Cuban people is a modern day expression of the most vile colonialism. How ironic it is that the Bush Administration accuses the Cuban government of violating "human rights" when the only place in Cuba where the authorities engage in systematic torture of prisoners held without Due Process rights is the portion under the control of the U.S. government.
Say No to Torture -- Say No to Bush’ s Imperial Government
The establishment of a torture facility at a US naval base located in a foreign country is not an isolated criminal act by this administration. It is part of a pattern whose methods and goals are now obvious. The Bush White House, in both its domestic and foreign policy, wants to establish that all existing international and domestic law that in any way inhibits the assumption of near-dictatorial power by the President of the United States must be declared null and void.
The so-called war on terrorism is revealed as nothing more than a slogan masking a quest for unfettered empire. The war of aggression against Iraq; the assassination of targeted individuals; the establishment of torture facilities and secret prisons around the world; the secret phone record collection, warrantless wiretapping and monitoring of the email of millions of Americans -- all of this constitutes a brazen effort to assume unfettered authority and power.
This is the challenge of our time. Will the people intervene and act decisively? The people of the United States, in partnership with the peoples of all continents, are a power far greater than the Bush White House. But we must act. Each one of us must act to inform our neighbors, family members and co-workers.
