USA: Activists call for Biden to close Guantanamo on prison's 20th anniversary

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Human rights campaigners gathered in Washington DC on Tuesday to mark the 20 year anniversary of the opening of Guantanamo Bay detention camp. Attendees present demanded US President Joe Biden release its remaining 39 detainees and shut down the facility.

Organised by the anti-Guantanamo campaign group ‘Witness Against Torture,’ several activists were seen wearing orange jumpsuits and black overhead hoods, images long associated with the US detention camp.

“We are still here because that place of hatred, and violence, and punishment has survived two decades, four presidents and has withstood all of our protests and song and fasting and work, but we’re are still here,” said one of the group’s co-founders Frida Berrigan.

Tom Wilner, the attorney to 14 Guantanamo detainees, also spoke to the crowd.

“There are 39 people at Guantanamo still. There were 780 at the beginning only 12 of those have been accused of being connected with terrorism. From the very beginning of the 780 people at Guantanamo only 16 of those people have been accused of engaging or supporting terrorism. It’s an amazing thing because the world thinks of Guantanamo as a place for terrorists, that’s not so,” explained Wilner.

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SOT, Frida Berrigan, Co-founder of ‘Witness Against Torture’: “We never imagined in 2007 when we first gathered as a Witness against Torture community to mark January 11 as a day of national shame. Gathering to resist torture, indefinite detention, scapegoating, islamophobia. Never imagined that we would still be here today, twenty years after of the opening Guantanamo to so called War on Terror combatants.”

SOT, Frida Berrigan, Co-founder of ‘Witness Against Torture’: “But we are still here because that place of hatred, and violence, and punishment has survived two decades, four presidents and has withstood all of our protests and song and fasting and work, but we’re are still here.”

SOT: Tom Wilner, attorney of Guantanamo detainees: “There are 39 people at Guantanamo still. There were 780 at the beginning only 12 of those have been accused of being connected with terrorism. From the very beginning of the 780 people at Guantanamo only 16 of those people have been accused of engaging or supporting terrorism. It’s an amazing thing because the world thinks of Guantanamo as a place for terrorists, that’s not so.”

SOT, Tom Wilner, Attorney of Guantanamo detainees: “Extraordinarily, almost all of them were tortured. It’s not just the people accused of terrorism that were tortured. Almost all of them were tortured. I have represented 14 and 13 of them are gone. All 14 were tortured, beat up. The worst torture, which they’ve always told me, is being there without the ability to prove your innocence.”

#USA #Biden #Guantanamo

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