On Tuesday, Jan. 11, Pax Christi USA joined twenty-eight national faith groups in sending a letter to President Biden and all Members of Congress calling on them “to close the prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba and to ensure that all of the people held there are either released, agree to a plea deal, or receive a fair trial in a federal court.”
Rev. Ron Stief, Executive Director of the National Religious Campaign Against Torture, released the following statement:
“For twenty years our country has held people without charge or trial in Guantanamo. Some of the people we still hold there were tortured by the U.S. after they were captured. Others have been cleared to leave Guantanamo yet remain imprisoned there, indefinitely detained without trial. Today, on the anniversary of the day the first detainees were sent to Guantanamo, a broad swath of the American faith community wrote to President Biden and to Congress to call on them to finally close the prison. Twenty years of Guantanamo is twenty years too long.”
The letter is available in PDF and begins as follows:
Dear President Biden and Members of Congress,
As members of the American faith community, we call on you to close the prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba and to ensure that all of the people held there are either released, agree to a plea deal, or receive a fair trial in a federal court.
The prison at Guantanamo was opened as part of an effort to hold suspected terrorists outside of the protections of U.S. law. This was wrong to begin with, however this immoral act was compounded by the decision to torture many of the prisoners. In the fullness of time we now know that many of the people sent to Guantanamo were never involved in terrorism in the first place...