Everything is connected

To the Editor:

 

As I write, I've just returned from the American Civil Liberties Union's June 26 “Day of Action for Law and Justice” in Washington. One of the organizing group's major issues — the one for which I carried a poster — is to close the U.S. prison for “enemy combatants” at Guantanamo. That — and other issues pertaining to law and justice where the U.S. government has departed from our Constitution and from international law — marked the specialness I felt that day.

 

Many of us had been to Washington and New York over the last five years, but those rallies and marches could be called “anti-war” rallies. They were to keep the United States from going into Iraq or to demand that the country withdraw. But this, we said, was a rally, “for human rights,” or “for civil liberties.” We wanted habeas corpus to be restored. We wanted Congress to bring the Military Commissions Act of 2006 into harmony with international law. We wanted to see “extraordinary renditions” stopped.

 

As I held my sign, I thought how strange it was that by some “historical accident” war prisoners from Afghanistan and Iraq were being held in Cuba. But I didn't know my history. Guantanamo, Cuba, is more a part of world history than I was aware. What happened in Cuba began a raging sickness that infected this nation at the end of the 19th century, transforming it from a small, anti-militaristic, somewhat isolationist country into a world empire, feared — and often hated — by many of the world's nations.

 

Imperialism was foreign to America's founders. But once we had grown to fill the North American continent from East to West, greed, adventurism and crusading missionary zeal worked together to demand that the United States seize its own empire. And it was the Spanish-American War of 1898 that was the opening these forces were looking for.

 

Peace was restored on Dec. 10, 1898, by the Treaty of Paris. It launched the United States into a previously unimaginable role as an explicitly imperial power. Cuba was given a sort of independence, but the U.S. Congress passed the notorious Platt Amendment in 1901, making Cuba a U.S. satellite while establishing a U.S. naval base at Guantanamo.

 

The Spanish-American War set the nation on the path to militaristic imperialism. It's in Iraq that we carry on that tradition right now. It's not strange that we use the base, which we first bullied our way into, as the place to imprison today's “unlawful enemy combatants.”

 

Al Krass, coordinator
Bucks and Montgomery chapters
Coalition for Peace Action