(DV) Sheehan: Our Road to Guantanamo

Asif Iqbal is a quiet, but funny and quick-witted 25-year-old British man of Indian descent who was detained illegally in Guantanamo Bay prison for 2½ years before his government was finally able to obtain his release.

Asif's story is a traumatic tale of survival. From the first moment that he was sold to the Americans by bounty hunters, he was forced to leave Afghanistan, miraculously lived through hails of bullets that killed hundreds in the back of truck containers to arriving in Guantanamo prison camp where he was actually relieved to discover that he would be in the hands of Americans. Asif was under the tragic and very mistaken impression that Americans were good and would treat him more humanely than his captors. He soon found out that Americans could be just as brutal as the next person.

Asif was put through the most horrendous torture and lived to survive and have his and two other detainee's stories told in The Road to Guantanamo. Matthew Whitecross the filmmaker documented 700 pages of testimony to produce this factual and brutal movie. I don't know how anyone, even one with the tiniest, blackest heart of all could not be intensely affected by this movie and Asif's unspeakable experiences. Asif came to Cuba this past week to protest with us on the other side of the gates.

Zohra's road to Guantanamo probably affected me the most. Her son, Omar DeGhaye, has been detained there almost since the infamous prison debuted its vicious and illegal purpose on January 11, 2001. Omar was sold by a bounty hunter in Pakistan as he tried to get a visa for his new wife to travel to London with him. Zorah and her other son, Taher DeGhaye traveled all the way to Guantanamo from Dubai.

Zohra sobbed as she watched Asif's story. One can imagine that her distress was bad enough when she only imagined the inhumane treatment that her son was receiving at the hands of the "good" Americans, but seeing a factual account in living color on a movie screen and hearing Asif's testimony was so heartbreaking to her. I, myself, was heartbroken when she approached me at the torture chamber's front gate and said in her soft broken English: "If only they would let me talk to Omar. To hear his voice would be a miracle to me."

Adele Welty's road to Guantanamo closely parallels mine. Her courageous and handsome son, Timmy, was killed in one of the towers on 9-11. Adele is a member of "9-11 Families for Peaceful Tomorrows" and has traveled both to Afghanistan and Iraq as a good-will ambassador whose heart is filled with love and compassion for the people that BushCo are destroying by exploiting her son's death: constantly. It took Bloody George 3½ paragraphs before he used 9-11 as one of the rationales for wreaking more havoc in Iraq in his escalation speech. Adele urgently called for all Americans to persistently harass their elected officials to give the prisoners at Guantanamo due process and then shut the gulag down.

Colonel Ann Wright who is a dear friend and a companion in the struggle, arrived at Guantanamo through a life in which her entire adult years were taken up by service to our country in the Army Reserves and as a diplomat who resigned in 2003 in opposition to the Iraq War. What acutely stabs Ann in the heart is that American soldiers act so viciously towards fellow human beings. The kind of behavior demonstrated by U.S. soldiers in Guantanamo not only lowers themselves to the level of animals, but endangers their brothers and sisters in arms who may be targets of reprisals and brutality themselves.

Bill Goodman, an attorney with the Center for Constitutional Rights and his group represent almost all of the prisoners who are incarcerated there against our own Constitution, international law and the Geneva Conventions. It saddens Bill that we have a renegade and rogue government in DC that sanctions and has, in fact, codified torture and taking away the basic human rights of prisoners of which not one has been found guilty of anything, and in fact, very few have even been charged.

My road to Guantanamo began on April 4, 2004. My son was killed for the insatiable greed, immoral stupidity, and cruelty of BushCo. Casey and my family were used as pawns in the bloody game of corporate greed and militarism that abused Asif and Omar and devastated Adele and Zohra; the same ineptitude and callousness that have saddened Ann and Bill who both have been such noble servants of our Constitution and defenders of true freedom. Bloody BushCo brought us all together in an unlikely spot on a somber day.

Not one of us, not even Bill the attorney, can judge the guilt or innocence of a single inmate at Guantanamo. We are not saying they are all innocent and should be freed. We say that they deserve their days in court. Each and every one of them deserves to be charged, hear the evidence against him, be allowed to present a defense, and then be judged. BushCo refuses to call them prisoners of war, so they should be tried in criminal courts, not by military commissions without their rights to habeas corpus. In the old and now quaint US system of justice, one was held to be innocent until found guilty. In the BushCo system of justice anyone can be held guilty for an indefinite amount of time without due process or basic human comforts. A person in Bloody George's world can have menstrual blood spread on his face by a female guard, or be subjected to temperature or noise extremes. A human being in the Bloody George prison system can even be water-boarded or have his religion mocked and desecrated by the same people who claim to revere the Prince of Peace and Love. In America, many of the same people who condone the sadism of Guantanamo would raise a bloody uproar if animals were treated half as badly as the humans of Guantanamo.

It is just plain wrong. And it is wrong to either condone it, or condemn it without corresponding action.

We eight converged in Guantanamo together from different paths. Some of our paths were marred by unrelenting pain and some by a sense of injustice, but all with the common mission to finally call this violence what it is: barbarism and to call our leaders what they are: barbarians.

The USA is no longer admired as a nation that can be respected because of the blatant atrocities of Bloody George the Torturer's reign of Terror. We the people who are inhabitants of this planet and intimately connected to both the tortured and torturer in Guantanamo need to demand some basic changes:

Charge the prisoners and appropriately punish them or let them go.

Close the torture chamber of Guantanamo prison and other prisons or torture chambers around the world.

Repeal the Military Commission's Act and restore habeas corpus.

Hold BushCo accountable for the heartache and heartlessness they have forced on the world.

Get on the phone this minute.

In Search of Peace is a series of reflections on Cindy's Journey towards true and lasting peace.

Cindy Sheehan is the mother of Spc. Casey Sheehan who was killed in Bush's war of terror on 04/04/04. She is the co-founder and president of Gold Star Families for Peace and the Camp Casey Peace Institute. She is the author of three books, the most recent is Peace Mom: A Mother's Journey Through Heartache to Activism.