Close Guantanamo
The Petition
To President George Bush and Members of the House and Senate;
We are deeply disturbed by the report issued on February 15, 2006, by the Commission on Human Rights of the Economic and Social Council of the United Nations that the US has engaged in practices at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba that
must be assessed as amounting to torture
We agree strongly with the recommendation by the five Special Rapporteurs that
the United States Government should either expeditiously bring all Guantanamo Bay detainees to trial
or release them without further delay
and that
the United States Government should close the Guantanamo Bay detention facility without further delay
and with UN Secretary General Kofi Annan that
sooner or later there will be a need to close Guantanamo, and I think it will be up to the [US] government to decide hopefully to do it as soon as possible
The 45 square miles of the Guantanamo base cost millions of dollars annually to maintain and are completely controlled by the US yet are said to lie outside the protections of our Constitution.
To prevent such abuse in the future, it is also time to consider ending the perpetual lease of Guantanamo and our annual un-deposited payment to Cuba of $4,085.
