When the U.S. kidnapped President Maduro 5 days ago, we wondered if he would be taken to Guantanamo. As it turned out he was brought there but only on the way to be transferred to NYC where the government plans to try him and his wife in federal court. We note that none of the hundreds of men held at the U.S. torture camp ever have been brought to the U.S. and recently others are being pushed through its inhumane doors on the way to third country prisons.
The RefuseFascism podcast this week features a discussion on the brazen and criminal attack on Venezuela and kidnapping of its president and his wife, the Trump regime’s goals for the hemisphere, and what people of conscience must do in response.
Of course we all have to be raising our voices in protest.
From Andy Worthington: 24 years of Guantánamo Sunday January 11 – Global Vigils to Close Guantanamo
>>Print off and take photos with the Close Guantanamo campaign’s
of the prison’s existence on Jan. 11.
Sunday January 11 — Global vigils mark the unforgivable 24th anniversary of the opening of the prison at Guantánamo Bay, where 15 men are still held in various states of fundamental lawlessness in this “war on terror” prison, although none are detained on anything resembling a legally sound basis.
Six of the 15 are held without charge or trial, six face charges in a broken trial system, the military commissions, that are incapable of delivering justice; one is in legal limbo after being judged mentally unfit to stand trial; another, severely disabled, agreed to a plea deal; and another is serving a life sentence in solitary confinement after a one-sided trial 17 years ago in which he refused to mount a defense.
Eleven vigils are taking place — eight across the US, including outside the White House, and three at other locations worldwide, in London, Brussels and Mexico City.
Please join us if you find this ongoing but largely forgotten injustice intolerable. As I explain in my recent article, “Although the existence of the ‘war on terror’ prison has been largely lost in a fog of amnesia for more years than most of us care to remember, it still remains hugely significant that, for 24 years now, and on an ongoing basis, successive U.S. governments have lawlessly claimed that they have the right to hold people at Guantánamo indefinitely without charge or trial, or, if they are to be charged and tried, to do so in a broken system, the military commissions, that, after 24 years, must be irrevocably judged to have proven itself incapable of delivering justice.”
If you can’t be present in person, feel free to join us by sending in a photo with the Close Guantánamo campaign’s poster marking how long Guantánamo will have been open on January 11 — 8,767 days — as part of an ongoing photo campaign we’ve been running every 100 days, and on the anniversaries of the prison’s opening, since 2018. (Send photos to info@closeguantanamo.org).
We will also, of course, be campaigning against Donald Trump’s use of Guantánamo to hold migrants, in the “war on migrants” that he declared when he took office for the second time last January. Around 730 men have been held, although all, or almost all of them have subsequently been repatriated or sent back to ICE detention facilities on the U.S. mainland. Last month, a judge confirmed that the entire policy was illegal, although, probably in spite, the administration subsequently sent 22 Cuban migrants there, whose current status is unknown.
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