Guantanamo Bay Prison

Guantanamo Bay Prison

The United States government has broken its long lasting tradition of protecting human rights by allowing the mistreatment of prisoners in the Guantanamo bay prison on the island of Cuba [Gitmo]. America has always been a nation that promotes and protects human rights to the rest of the world. The long standing tradition of obeying the values instituted by the Constitution and the Bill of Rights has been reversed by Guantanamo Bay. The human rights that the U.S. stands for have not been provided for the detainees at Guantanamo. The sheer existence of the Guantanamo Bay camp contradicts most values and beliefs put forth by the U.S. government, thereby steadily decreasing people’s trust in the word of politicians.

Despite ongoing media coverage, the Guantanamo Bay prison remains a fairly unfamiliar topic to most people. America is more focused on what is going on in Iraq and Afghanistan, than what is happening at Guantanamo. Society is not familiar with the identity of the prisoners, their wrongdoing, the charges against them, or the possibility of a release. Guantanamo is a prison where the US government keeps suspected members of al-Qaeda and the Taliban. Without clear evidence of guilt, these suspected men and children have been arrested throughout the world and said to be dangerous for the security of the United States and the rest of the western world. Majority of people are opposed to the existence of the prison argue that there was no sufficient proof that these men are of any danger to the US or the world. If the government has no sufficient proof that the men are guilty, why are they locked down and not given the right to trial? The captured men are not informed of the reason they are kept away in isolation for three years and want to be either released or simply charged with some crime. The American officials claim that the captured men have some knowledge about terrorist attacks or any other terrorist activities. However “only four have been charged with crimes” in the past three years and the majority are innocent of any crimes (Locy). The government does not consider the men prisoners of war, which means they do not benefit from rights under the Geneva Convention, which protects POWs from indefinite imprisonment and aggressive interrogation. And since the camp is not on the US soil, and the detainees are not covered with the Geneva Convention, many innocent men have no rights as human being and can not do anything about it.

If the government of the United States preaches and promises one idea, and then does the contrary, it is difficult for the society to establish a trust in that government. Ever since America became a nation, it always valued equality, religious freedom, opposing injustice, and tyranny. Furthermore protecting human rights and liberties that apply to all human beings have always been important traits of the American political landscape. This way of life is encouraged to the whole world as the principal and the best way of government; A Democracy. According to the president of the United States, George W. Bush in a recent interview, “The Universal Declaration of Human Rights affirms the inalienable rights of people everywhere”. However the traditional law was not applied to the men at Guantanamo Bay prison. The USA Today magazine states that the US keeps more than 520 mostly unidentified foreigners looked up on an isolated beachfront, while lecturing other nations about democratic values (“It’s the policies”). Treating people like animals is not the American way. There were no rights given to the detainees and no guide lines made for authorities behavior toward isolated prisoners, meaning that authorities can do whatever they please. Even if the detainees wanted to defend themselves of not being guilty and wanted to escape the abuse, they were not allowed to obtain lawyers. The treatment of prisoners there [Guantanamo] has hurt the nation’s reputation on human rights. Our government is not permitted to treat the prisoners inhumanly, and if it does, it is disrespectful of everything we fought for so long as a nation.

The United States has gone so far with the extreme holding of the “suspected terrorists” that it is being compared world wide to the Soviets gulags. The Soviets gulags accrued during 1929 through 1953 where

“Men, women, even children guilty of nothing were sent to camps in Siberia where they were worked often literally to death. Applebaum writes that “prisoners were also locked in punishment cells until they died of cold and starvation, left untreated in unheated hospitals, or simply shot at will for attempted escape” .(Chavez)

It is an embarrassment to the nation and the world