Close Guantánamo and Save the U.S.

Five years after the first group of detainees arrived in Guantánamo, In These Times presents a unique three-article exposé of the damage this legal no-man’s land has wrought upon democracy.

The articles appear in February’s 30th anniversary issue of In These Times and go online this week.

* TODAY: Karen Greenberg lists the “8 Reasons to Close Guantánamo Now.”
* Tuesday, Feb. 13: H. Candace Gorman goes “Inside America’s Gulag.”
* Wednesday, Feb. 14: Mischa Gaus investigates Guantánamo’s “Interrogations Behind Barbed Wire.”

Download a PDF of the February issue.

For more information, or to interview Karen Greenberg, H. Candace Gorman or Mischa Gaus contact:

Erin Polgreen, Associate Publisher
erin@inthesetimes.com
773/772.0100 Ext. 225


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In the first part of this series, Karen J. Greenberg, executive director of the Center on Law and Security at NYU School of Law, gives “8 reasons why Closing Guantánamo will save the U.S.” The most compelling? “Closing Guntánamo will help to restore America?s standing in the world and in the eyes of its own citizens.


“Closing Guantánamo is not about bowing to human rights concerns or even to the law,” Greenberg writes. “We must close it as a signal to the world that, even in the face of danger, the United States remains true to its values.”


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Part two of the series zeros in on the confounding “parallel legal universe” that Guantánamo lawyer H. Candace Gorman faces on a daily basis. On Tuesday, February 13, “Inside America’s Gulag” details Gorman’s attempts to represent detainee Abdul Al Ghizzawi, a former spice shop owner who was turned in for a $5000 bounty.


“I can tell you unequivocally that my client is not a terrorist, and neither are a vast majority of prisoners locked up at Guantánamo,” Gorman writes. “But with legal geniuses like those running our country, is it any wonder that the men in Guantánamo have languished for five years?”


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And in “Interrogations Behind Barbed Wire,” Contributing Editor Mischa Gaus examines the history of U.S. intelligence services using drugs in dubious “mind control experiments” and reveals that two Guantánamo inmates have joined Jose Padilla in claiming that they were involuntarily drugged.



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