“I’ve been on hunger strike since Feb. 10,” said Samir Naji al Hasan Moqbel in The New York Times. Detained at Guantánamo for 11 years, I have never been charged with any crime or received a trial. In 2000, I moved from Yemen to Afghanistan to find work, but fled when the Americans invaded. I was arrested on false charges and sent to Gitmo. Because we detainees are being denied basic human rights, about 40 of us are refusing to eat; some prisoners are now below 100 pounds. The guards have reacted by tying us to chairs twice a day, strapping down our limbs, and shoving feeding tubes down our noses, as we bleed and vomit. I don’t want to die here, but I hope that because of our hunger strike, “the eyes of the world will once again look to Guantánamo before it is too late.”
Moqbel’s is “one of the most powerful op-eds you will ever read,” said Glenn Greenwald in Guardian.co.uk. Every American should feel shame that our country is imprisoning human beings indefinitely without charges, and treating them so horribly that they’d rather starve to death than go on. Just six of the 166 Guantánamo detainees face formal charges. Eighty-six others have been cleared to go, but can’t leave because of Obama’s 2010 moratorium on any Yemeni releases. “Few Americans really understand what’s happening at Guantánamo,” said John Dear in HuffingtonPost.com. In this “hell hole,” detainees are routinely humiliated, denied water and health care. Why not give every one of them a trial, and let those we can’t convict go home? “Or are we a totalitarian state?”
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