VIDEO: Students Protest Guantanamo Bay, 10 Years After Opening
On a recent wet, cold afternoon, a line of human rights activists dressed in bright orange jumpsuits, black hoods, and shackles led a procession of protesters from the White House to the Supreme Court to mark, and denounce, the tenth anniversary of Guantanamo Bay, the controversial U.S. military prison in Cuba.
Many of the protesters at the Jan. 11 march were college and high school students—surprising if you consider that many of them were between 5 and 15 when Guantanamo Bay’s detention center imprisoned its first class of 20 detainees back in 2002.
Since 2002, close to 800 detainees have been incarcerated at Guantanamo. About 600 of those have been released; 171 detainees still remain at the U.S. military prison, according to Think Progress. Just eight percent of the prisoners were al Queda fighters, according to United States government data.
For student protesters at the march, Guantanamo Bay—often called "Gitmo"—represents an enduring reminder of the symptomatic erosion of civil liberties characteristic of wartime. It’s just one example of a long list of what some call "overreactions" to the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, in part produced by civil liberty-restricting bills like the USA PATRIOT Act, and systemically aggressive profiling and discrimination of Muslims at airports and beyond.
“Ever since I have been conscious of our legal system this has been in place,” Cameron Joyce, a student from UNC—Charlotte said. “It seems like blatant corruption of the system. We say we are for justice and then we blatantly ignore it for individuals we feel don’t qualify.”
For others, it's as simple as human rights violations.
Amnesty International’s national youth coordinator Cynthia Carrion said that, for most young people, human rights issues are easier to get behind than other issues—they don’t get easily bogged down by dense provisions or overly complicated by politics.
“For the most part we get this idea of indefinite detention and how that is a human rights violation,” Carrion said. “Guantanamo symbolizes so many human rights violations. So for high school students who are 15 now, and were five when this came about, this is something that they understand.”
Students who have taken some civics courses may also have higher expectations for a country whose narrative orbits so closely around the concept of basic rights for all.
“This is not the American they believe in. The America they believe is one that upholds the universal declaration of rights and upholds the Geneva Convention,” Carrion said. “We are here in the rain, in the cold, to show them that there is. Students from across the country have be driving through the night to be here—missing classes, cutting their vacation short to show support.”
Another cause of concern among young demonstrators was the recent passage of the National Defense Authorization Act. Despite President Obama's “reservations” about the bill, certain ambiguous language that leaves Americans vulnerable to interrogation and indefinite detainment without trial makes many students worried.
“For the future, it makes me uncomfortable about where our justice system is willing to go,” Joyce said. “If we are capable of doing this to non-citizens, and now writing it into laws that permit Americans to be detained—I think that’s a slippery slope.”
In 2009, President Obama signed an executive order to close Guantanamo Bay but his plan to transplant detainees to federal prisons on the U.S. mainland was thwarted by fierce congressional opposition. Unable to persuade even his own party members, Obama caved in under political pressure and allowed military tribunals to continue at the U.S. naval base based in Cuba. For the second year, the National Defense Authorization Act bars the transfers of detainees to U.S. soil. It also tightens restrictions on transferring Guantanamo detainees to other countries. Of the 171 prisoners who still remain imprisoned on the U.S. naval base, 89 have been cleared for transfer or release but are either stuck in political limbo or are unable to be released because they are from Yemen. In 2010, Obama stopped the transfers of Yemeni detainees due to the country’s “political instability” after it was revealed that Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab—called the "underwear bomber"—was trained in Yemen by al Qaeda groups.
Chris Jarrett, an occupier from the Occupy Raleigh camp in North Carolina, said some language in the provision is so vague that he worries the law could be used to stifle political dissent.
“If they can classify Americans as terrorists and indefinitely detain you that’s dangerous," Jarret said. "As occupiers that is a concern for us because they can consider us as political terrorists…in theory, we are at risk as well.”
Fellow Raleigh occupier Shaun Ridgway agreed.
“'Terrorist' is such a loose definition these days,” Ridgway said. ”We have the potential to have civil unrest being labeled as terrorism.”
Others, like Jannat Majeed, a student from the University of North Carolina—Charlotte, said the Defense Authorization Act makes closing down Guantanamo Bay more palatable to American citizens.
“I think now it will get easier as the days go along,” Majeed said. “Now you don’t have to think about people over there but people in the United States being targeted.”
For Muslim American Hamzah Latif—a student group coordinator of Amnesty International from the University of Michigan—the threat of being swept up by U.S. authorities is all too great.
Latif flew from Qatar to America to continue his high school education and be with his family, who already have roots in the U.S. But the National Security Agency intercepted Latif when he landed in New York and rummaged through his belonging, destroying his laptop, Latif said.
“I asked someone why they thought that [the NSA] treated me the way they did. They said ‘You are an older teenager, Muslim, flying in from Qatar with a one-way ticket and you look Arab-American,’” Latif said. "I think that was the day I realized that, to the government, I'm not just some kid who came here so I could join my family of 18 uncles and aunts and 25 cousins. I was a suspicious young adult with unclear motives flying in from a dangerous area of the world with no intentions of going back.”
Majeed echoed those worries.
“As a Muslim American this is an issue that is close to my heart,” Majeed said. “I constantly have to worry about male members of my family because of the screwed up justice system in this country. Now that the [Defense Authorization Act] has been passed, it works on a multitude of different levels.”
Naima Ramos-Chapman is an associate editor at Campus Progress. Tara Kutz is a video communications associate at Campus Progress.
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