Guantanamo and Gaza—Who We Are

Bear with me—this is a screed. The truth demands nothing less.

Guantanamo. The place name—perhaps, for anyone paying attention to world affairs— the place name alone stirs profound emotions. Distress and disgust, among them. Deeply sincere empathy. What has been done there—unfathomable!

Guantanamo—a symbol: It represents for me how very wrong our country has behaved. Depravity. Unconscionable arrogance. Profoundly despicable, it stands as a symbol of American arrogance and inhumane insensitivity.

I am, not so proudly—in truth, actually shamefully– a Vietnam veteran having volunteered to serve there. Not long after that misbegotten war I began to see my decision as disturbingly uninformed. As we Americans are in general about our country’s history—I was ignorant and even misinformed.

Now, Guantanamo symbolically represents our country’s history and conduct. For me, it stands alongside my sentiments about our shameful war in Vietnam. An honest historical summary would discover a consistent thread from the time our colonial forebearers came to these shores. The “markers” would include the annihilation of perhaps over 100 million indigenous people—our predecessors on the continent, the slave trade, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, the fire-bombing of Tokyo, the flattening of North Korea, the displacement of the Marshallese driven from their irradiated island paradise, the environmental dystopia imposed on neighbors of our 800 military bases on foreign lands, shock and awe and the slaughter of hundreds of thousands as a consequence of our Great War on Terror. And that’s no exaggeration—the Watson Institute estimates our post-9/11 wars led to nearly 1 million deaths in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Syria, and Yemen.

All of them simply “others”! Some notable individuals of America’s “othering” come to mind—Leonard Peltier, Julian Assange, Edward Snowden among them.

All of this speaks loudly as to who we really are—to the rest of the world—we Americans, we seem to believe, “we are worth more, they are worth less.” And we just don’t seem to give a damn.

And, of course, now there is Gaza—and, make no mistake, Gaza is as much “ours” as it is Israel’s. Guantanamo and Gaza—that’s who we are. It’s what we do. We who are here today are trying desperately for that not to be us. That’s why I am here and, I believe why we’re all here.

We know that 15 men remain imprisoned at Guantanamo, six of whom have never been charged, three of whom have been cleared for release. What has been done there, like the rest of it, is just absolutely unfathomable.

May God—have mercy on us.

Spoken in tribute to Frank Panopoulos, for his steadfast representation of victims of the empire incarcerated at Guantanamo to include Abdulmalik Mohammed, a citizen of Kenya, who was released in December after having been held for 17 years without trial.