Waterboarding humanity by Virginia Robertson

There are crimes against humanity that happen in silence, hidden behind closed doors, buried beneath bureaucracy, and suffocated by national security memos. Then there is Guantanamo Bay, a glaring monument to hypocrisy, openly mocking every human rights declaration ever signed, ratified, and paraded in front of cameras.

For over two decades now, Guantanamo has sat like a stubborn stain on the conscience of the so-called free world. A Cuban no man’s land leased by the world’s loudest democracy to imprison men without trial, where orange jumpsuits replaced due process and “enhanced interrogation” replaced justice. And yet the real torture might be this: the collective shrug from humanity, the uncomfortable silence of nations, the quiet normalization of something so clearly inhumane.

We’ve failed. Spectacularly. And not because Guantanamo exists. But because it still exists.

Because in the year 2025, we are still talking about indefinite detention, about people rotting in legal limbo. Because nations who proudly wave the banner of “never again” still build black sites and still outsource torture with the same moral flexibility as tax havens. Because we have invented euphemisms for cruelty, extraordinary rendition, rectal feeding, sensory deprivation, as if wrapping abuse in bureaucratic language makes it any less vile.

Humanity’s failure to stop torture is not just in Guantanamo. It’s in the International Criminal Court that tiptoes around powerful nations. It’s in the “strategic ambiguity” that allows Western countries to criticize despotic regimes for human rights abuses while simultaneously selling them weapons or trading intelligence with them. It’s in the way news cycles treat torture allegations as just another headline to scroll past before the football scores.

We like to think we’ve evolved. That torture is something medieval, done in dungeons with iron maidens and red-hot pokers. But the truth is far worse: we’ve just digitized it, outsourced it, anonymized it. We no longer break bodies with racks, we break minds with sensory deprivation, indefinite isolation, and the sheer psychological terror of being forgotten. There are men in Guantanamo who have never been charged, never seen a courtroom, and whose only certainty is uncertainty. Imagine waking up every day not knowing if today you’ll be freed, fed, or waterboarded. That’s not national security. That’s cruelty with a spreadsheet.

The United Nations has condemned it. Amnesty International has published volumes on it. Every decent lawyer who still believes in habeas corpus has decried it. Presidents have promised to close it; Barack Obama signed an executive order on his second day in office. That was in 2009. In the time since, children have been born, educated, and become old enough to vote, while detainees in Guantanamo have grown old without a single day in court.

So what’s the excuse now? Politics, of course. Always politics. The moral gymnasts argue that these are the “worst of the worst” a phrase coined to bypass due process entirely, as if labeling someone is enough to strip them of their humanity. Others claim that releasing them would be a security risk, ignoring that a justice system unwilling to try someone is already a risk to democracy.

But let’s not kid ourselves: Guantanamo survives not because of security concerns, but because humanity has lost the political and moral will to confront its own reflection. The prison is not a security facility, it’s a mirror. One that shows just how far we’re willing to go when fear trumps principle.

The bitter irony? The world that created Guantanamo is the same one that holds annual conferences on human rights, where diplomats sip cocktails and nod gravely at the word “torture” before returning to policies that perpetuate it. It’s the same world that denounces authoritarianism while sustaining a permanent prison camp based on extrajudicial detainment.

What happened to outrage? Where is the moral clarity that once defined human rights movements? Have we become so cynical, so tired, so overloaded with crises that torture no longer shocks us?

Let’s be honest. We live in an age where virtue-signaling tweets substitute real action, where justice is conditional and selective, and where being “anti-torture” is about as radical as being anti-plague. And yet, when the world needed action, we offered platitudes. When the world needed courage, we offered committees. When the world needed closure, we offered delay.

Guantanamo Bay is not just America’s shame. It’s the world’s. Because it continues with the quiet permission of every nation that claims to care about human rights but does nothing. It is a lesson we refuse to learn, a wound we refuse to clean.

And until we close it—not just literally, but philosophically, systemically and morally, then we remain all of us, complicit. Not just in the torture of men in orange suits, but in the slow, excruciating waterboarding of humanity’s own soul.

So here’s a thought: maybe the question isn’t why Guantanamo is still open. Maybe the real question is: why do we keep pretending we’re better than this?

Because at the end of the day, it’s not Guantanamo that’s on trial. It’s us.