Washington has no right to hold a single one of them, and their treatment at the hands of the U.S. military is an outrage. It is meant to make working people the world over get used to harsher treatment of anyone whom Washington deems it has the "right" to capture, interrogate, transport, and jail indefinitely.

The U.S. imperialists are holding the men without charging them with any crime. They have denied them access to lawyers and stripped them of any rights. And although U.S. president Bush continually claims his government and class are part of the "civilized world," nowhere else in the annals of modern history have prisoners been forced to live in open-air cages like animals.

Admissions by U.S. officials that it has become common practice for them to arrest people abroad and take them to Egypt, Jordan, or elsewhere for torture sessions shows that Washington would like to make the outdoor prison cages in Guantánamo not the exception but the rule.

The U.S. government continues to illegally occupy Guantánamo base at the eastern end of Cuba under a lease signed with a U.S.-installed regime in 1903. Since 1959 the Cuban government has called for the removal of the military facility. However, Washington has refused to give up this military toehold against the Cuban Revolution. By holding the prisoners at the base, the U.S. government is bound by neither the restrictions nor the political fallout it would face if it brought them to U.S. soil.  
 
Dehumanizing treatment
Washington has sought to dehumanize and break the prisoners from the very beginning. They were transported in the freezing holds of military cargo planes, under sedation and with hoods or blacked-out goggles over their eyes; held in chicken wire cages--described as "kennels" by one reporter--exposed to sun and rain, with one-inch thick foam mats as beds; and constantly shackled and handcuffed.

The Pentagon has termed the men "unlawful combatants," refusing to even acknowledge that they are prisoners of war--a classification that would require its actions to be judged according to the 1949 Geneva Convention on such prisoners. POWs, according to that convention, include members of militias and "volunteer corps, including those of organized resistance movements, belonging to a Party to the conflict and operating in or outside their own territory," with the proviso that they serve under a command structure and openly carry weapons.

While claiming that Camp X-Ray "will be humane," Marine Brig.-Gen. Michael Lehnert stated, "We have no intention of making it comfortable."

In January U.S. defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld said that some prisoners at Guantánamo would face indefinite detention. "The issue as to what happens to those people will follow the interrogations and the process of getting as much information out of them as we can," he stated.

The U.S. government has tried to portray those incarcerated at Guantánamo as exclusively prisoners captured in Afghanistan. But protests in Bosnia helped to break the information blockade. Six men who were all married to Bosnian women were turned over to Washington after U.S. authorities accused them of having links to al Qaeda. Some 300 friends and family members mobilized in support of the six as they were being transferred to U.S. custody by Bosnian officials. Police armed in riot gear dispersed the crowd.

The ongoing hunger strike by prisoners at the base shows they have neither lost their spirit of resistance nor allowed their imperialist captors to break them.  
 
Rationalizing imperialist brutality
Why should workers and farmers the world over consistently oppose Washington's wars, jailing of prisoners, and use of torture, the death penalty, and other weapons of terror against working people?

From its birth as an imperialist power Washington has justified every war and assault on working people as part of the struggle of a just nation to bring peace to the world, to oppose fascist tyranny or totalitarian regimes, or to rid the world of drugs and terrorists. They now claim their next war will be to keep the "civilized" countries safe from "weapons of mass destruction"--something the rulers of the "civilized countries" have in abundance and don't want the "less civilized" to get their hands on.

But each justification is simply window-dressing to advance the interests of a tiny handful of superwealthy ruling families in the United States, both against working people at home and abroad. The U.S. rulers know no bounds to the brutality they will use, and are "civilized" only to the extent that the struggles of workers and farmers have carved out rights and political space. The true face of the U.S. imperialist masters can be seen in their record, from the colonization of Puerto Rico, through the use of the two atomic bombs against the people of Japan, to the litany of countries devastated by imperialist war and economic depravation. It can be seen in the imposition of Jim Crow segregation, through the Palmer Raids, to the concentration camps for people of Japanese descent in World War II.

There is no further evidence needed anytime Washington imprisons its war victims to justify a vigorous campaign to demand their immediate release.

During World War II the Militant and the Socialist Workers Party campaigned to expose similar lies by Washington that sought to hide the class truth of its brutal rule.

In 1943, in the midst of the inter-imperialist slaughter, the U.S. post office canceled the Militant's second class mailing privileges. Among the exhibits used to justify this undemocratic act was an Oct. 24, 1942, editorial entitled, "Yes, punish the war criminals." The offending paragraph read:

"The English imperialists are not waging a war to destroy fascism. In order to preserve their smallest colony they would readily destroy every democratic right at home. They are sending the masses into slaughter only in order to preserve their empire. America's Sixty Families pursue aims no less predatory, reactionary and imperialist than do the Krupps, the Kirdorfs, and Boersigs of Germany.

"They all bear the real responsibility for the war. They are all equally guilty. They, together with their real political representatives, are the war criminals.

"We are wholeheartedly in agreement with the idea of bringing all these criminals and their respective Hesses to trial without delay. When the workers of all countries have said their final say, this is precisely what they will do. . . ."  
 
Fight to free German prisoners of war
Three years later the Militant campaigned for the immediate release of the German prisoners of war held by Washington. In the United States alone some 350,000 were held in slave-like conditions. Reading the articles about the conditions the prisoners were subjected to brings the decades together as if in a day.

"There is no coddling of the German prisoner," one capitalist newspaper read. Many prisoners were placed on bread and water in a solitary cell "with nothing on the concrete floor but a mattress for a period of up to two weeks," another reported. Thousands of prisoners were supplied to factory and agricultural firms as cheap labor gangs.

"How long these prisoners of war will be held here is not known," the Militant reported. "Against them war is being continued indefinitely. Now that 'peace' has been proclaimed in Europe, all American troops ought to be withdrawn without delay. And the German prisoners in this country should be given transport back to their homeland."

This past week a prisoner at the Guantánamo base somehow caught the ear of a CNN crew. "We need the world to know about us!" he yelled at a van carrying the reporters. "We are innocent here in this cage. We have no legal rights, nothing. So can somebody know about us? Can you tell the world about us?"

Working people everywhere need to respond to this appeal and press the fight for the U.S. imperialists to release the prisoners now.
 
 
Related articles:
Hunger strikers demand right to wear turban
Washington prepares war against Iraq
Bloody assault shores up U.S. domination in Afghanistan  
 
 
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