Why we are demonstrating to Shut Down Guantanamo Now

Join us at the White House on Saturday, May 18 at 5pm

May 2, 2013

The Obama administration continues to incarcerate and torture (i.e., force feed) prisoners at Guantanamo who are conducting a hunger strike that has entered its third month.

It is a demagogic ploy by the president to again publicly call for the eventual closing of the Guantanamo torture center while not using his presidential authority to act now.

The hunger strikers have been held for more than a decade without trial. They prefer death to indefinite detention after years of brutal treatment and torture.

Of the 166 prisoners at Guantanamo, 86 were cleared for release by the president’s own interagency Task Force as of January 2010. But the president hasn’t released them so they can join their families after this decade-long nightmare.

Instead, the Obama administration resorts to brutal force feeding techniques to keep the prisoners alive. This is political too. The administration won’t close Guantanamo but wants to avoid the embarrassment of more suicides at the world’s most notorious torture chamber.

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