The Guantanamo Bay prison camp has been in the news lately because of prisoners’on-going hunger strike there. In fact, just this week, the U.S. government has ordered medical reinforcements to the prison in order to assist with the force-feeding of Guantanamo hunger strikers. The hunger strike began in early February with a couple of dozen people and has spread to over 100 men now. The New York Times editorial page characterized the strike as “a collective act of despair.” The prisoners are being held, some innocent and many without charges, at Guantanamo indefinitely.

I was recently brought to tears in reading an op-ed in the New York Times written by Samir Naji al Hasan Moqbel. al Hasan Moqbel has been a prisoner at Guantanamo for over 11 years and is one of the hunger strikers. He wrote:

“I’ve been on a hunger strike since Feb. 10 and have lost well over 30 pounds. I will not eat until they restore my dignity.

I’ve been detained at Guantánamo for 11 years and three months. I have never been charged with any crime. I have never received a trial.”

al Hasan Moqbel described a forced-feeding ritual which is torture plain & simple:

“I will never forget the first time they passed the feeding tube up my nose. I can’t describe how painful it is to be force-fed this way. As it was thrust in, it made me feel like throwing up. I wanted to vomit, but I couldn’t. There was agony in my chest, throat and stomach. I had never experienced such pain before. I would not wish this cruel punishment upon anyone.

I am still being force-fed. Two times a day they tie me to a chair in my cell. My arms, legs and head are strapped down. I never know when they will come. Sometimes they come during the night, as late as 11 p.m., when I’m sleeping.”

It is no wonder that the Guantanamo prisoners are despairing. The question is how do we as Americans feel and what will we do. This act of collective resistance by Guantanamo prisoners should be a jolt to our consciences and to our sense of morality and decency. Yet I have to admit that I am pessimistic that the majority of the country will be moved to pressure our elected officials to close the prison and to release the remaining prisoners on humanitarian grounds. Indeed, hunger strikes happen regularly in prisons across the U.S. They receive little to no media coverage and are usually invisible to the general public.

What is happening at Guantanamo is torture and it is being done in our name. But here’s the thing too. As I’ve mentioned, prisoners in our U.S.-based prisons routinely undertake hunger strikes to publicize the terrible conditions that they must endure and to insist that these are addressed. They too are often force-fed because prisoners do not have the right to choose to die. We cannot forget this and we must link it to what’s happening at Guantanamo. If we can find it in our hearts and minds to be outraged at the ghastly treatment of the prisoners at Guantanamo then we must also summon the same outrage for what is routinely taking place in U.S. prisons.

Prisoners in America, in general, are mostly hidden from public view. We like it that way. Many Americans seem to want to, in Barbara Deming’s words “wish them out of existence.” Deming wrote, to my mind, one of the best books about the experience of incarceration that I’ve ever read. Prison Notes recounts her 1964 imprisonment at the Albany City Jail in Georgia. Below is how she begins the book and I think that it is relevant to the current Guantanamo crisis:

January 27, 1964

Albany city jail, Georgia. The cop locks the door on us and walks off. Now we’re out of mischief. The barred steel door has banged shut; the big key has made a lot of noise; they have “put us away.” People still believe there is some magic in turning a key.

He walks past some other cages, running his night stick, clattering, along the bars; and then we hear him make a curious little clucking noise to the prisoners — as though human speech were not quite appropriate to cross the distance between us. Magically now, we are no longer quite of the same species.

As he goes, he glances down at his boots, and he puts his hand – as if to be sure of something — upon his wide leather belt with its creaking tooled-leather holster.

“Sonofabitch cops!” a prisoner rages, and grasps the bars and rattles them. “Oh goddam motherfucking sonofabitch! Wait till I get out of here tomorrow.”

I am reminded of a fairy tale I once heard about a miser and his old slippers. One day they cause him embarrassment and he tries to throw them away. He isn’t able to. He throws them out of the window, he buries them in the garden, he tries to burn them, he travels to a distant country and drops them in a pond; but each time fate returns them to him, and each time in a way that causes him mischief. They are too much a part of him. If the miser could not get rid of his old slippers… But people persist in believing that they can put other people from them.

Yes, they manage to sound very reasonable to themselves as they talk of deterring others from crime; but the act of putting a man in jail remains essentially the act of trying to wish that man out of existence. From the moment of arrest one begins to feel against one’s flesh the operation of this crude attempt at sorcery (p.1-2)

We currently have over 2.2 million people locked in cages across the U.S. and we have 166 at a Cuban prison called Guantanamo. We cannot “wish them out of existence.” We are responsible for and to them. The Guantanamo prisoners are crying out to us: “We are here, we are here and you cannot avert your eyes any longer. You cannot wish us out of existence. We are here.”

And so we are left to contemplate what each of us can do to move the political class to close this hell hole named Guantanamo prison. I am not a lawyer so I don’t understand any complicated legalese. I am a human being though and I do know something about being humane. So what can those of us who don’t want to lose our humanity do? Well there is the obligatory petition asking President Obama to close Guantanamo prison. However, I am afraid that a petition is not going to get this done. Amnesty International offers some suggestions. Their suggestions mostly focus on some executive actions that the President should take. Those can’t hurt. The truth, however, is something that no one really wants to hear. There is currently no constituency that is working exclusively to close Guantanamo prison. And so some of us are going to have to do the painstaking work of grassroots organizing; convincing fellow Americans that this travesty must come to an end. Their is base of people who are mobilized to take the closing of Guantanamo on as their top cause. If you polled Americans, would the issue rank in the top 50 of our concerns. I don’t think so. The same is true right now regarding the U.S. based effort to end mass incarceration. As someone who is steeped in the issue, I know that we are nowhere close to building a mass movement to end mass incarceration and to abolish prisons. As we try to build that movement however, we must make the connections between our local struggles against the PIC and the global ones. We have a lot of work to do. It’s my hope that we are up to the task.