CONTACT: Rev. T.C. Morrow, This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it and 202-547-1920
Washington, DC - On the 21st anniversary of the opening of the U.S. detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, the National Religious Campaign Against Torture and a diverse group of more than 100 organizations, sent a letter to the White House calling on President Biden to close the detention facility and end indefinite detention.
The full letter is available in PDF and reads as follows:
January 11, 2023
President Joseph Biden The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW
Washington, D.C. 20500
Dear President Biden:
We are a diverse group of non-governmental organizations working, in both the United States and other countries, on issues including international human rights, immigrants’ rights, racial justice, and combatting anti-Muslim discrimination. We write to urge you to prioritize closing the detention facility at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and ending indefinite military detention.
Among a broad range of human rights violations perpetrated against predominantly Muslim communities over the last two decades, the Guantánamo detention facility – built on the same military base where the United States unconstitutionally detained Haitian refugees in deplorable conditions in the early 1990s – is the iconic example of the abandonment of the rule of law.
The Guantánamo detention facility was designed specifically to evade legal constraints, and Bush administration officials incubated torture there.
Nearly eight hundred Muslim men and boys were held at Guantánamo after 2002, all but a handful without charge or trial. Thirty-five remain there today, at the astronomical cost of $540 million per year, making Guantánamo the most expensive detention facility in the world.
Guantánamo embodies the fact that the United States government has long viewed communities of color – citizens and non-citizens alike – as a security threat, to devastating consequences.
This is not a problem of the past. Guantánamo continues to cause escalating and profound damage to the aging and increasingly ill men still detained indefinitely there, most without charge and none having received a fair trial. It has also devastated their families and communities. The approach Guantánamo exemplifies continues to fuel and justify bigotry, stereotyping, and stigma. Guantánamo entrenches racial divisions and racism more broadly, and risks facilitating additional rights violations.
It is long past time for both a sea change in the United States’ approach to national and human security, and a meaningful reckoning with the full scope of damage that the post-9/11 approach has caused. Closing the Guantánamo detention facility, ending indefinite military detention of those held there, and never again using the military base for unlawful mass detention of any group of people are necessary steps towards those ends. We urge you to act without delay, and in a just manner that considers the harm done to the men who have been detained indefinitely without charge or fair trials for two decades.
Sincerely,
{{For the list of signatories, please go to the full letter}}
The National Religious Campaign Against Torture (NRCAT) is a membership organization committed to ending U.S.-sponsored torture, and cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment. Since its formation in January 2006, more than 300 religious organizations have joined NRCAT, including representatives from the Catholic, evangelical Christian, mainline Protestant, Unitarian Universalist, Quaker, Orthodox Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, Baha’i, Buddhist, and Sikh communities. Members include national denominations and faith groups, regional organizations and local congregations.
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