The “Close Guantanamo Now!” protest was held on January 11 at the Downtown L.A. Federal Building, 300 N. Los Angeles Street.

The 1967 film “To Sir, With Love” is the story of a teacher, played by Sidney Poitier, who gets a job in a high school in a rough, working-class British neighborhood. The assignment is regarded as thankless and even dangerous, but he eventually wins the trust and affection of his prematurely hardened students. The film’s theme song, which became a pop hit, speaks of “a man who taught me right from wrong and weak from strong; that’s a lot to learn.”

ICUJP Close GITMO activists make their statement, downtown Los Angeles Federal Building

The difference between weak and strong would seem so self-evident to render the need to learn it unnecessary. But is it?

As the United States reeled from the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the administration of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney took a series of steps designed to show the U.S. and the world its strength and resolve. Almost all of those steps—among them, the illegal and unprovoked war of aggression against Iraq, the 20-year morass of the war in Afghanistan, huge tax cuts for the wealthy who did not need them, and the functional elimination of Fourth Amendment protections against illegal search and seizure—have proven to be unwise, corrosive of America’s Constitutional order at home and of its standing in the world. They have shown weakness, not strength.

And so it has proven with the Guantanamo Bay detention center, another Bush-Cheney gift to the American people. The world opened on January 11, 2002, and it was designed to show the strength of America under attack. But it has proven instead to be yet another case where the United States traded its Constitutional birthright for a mess of Bush-Cheney pottage. Sadly, it has been kept open by presidential administrations of both parties and by Congress ever since, showing that many of the worst ideas in Washington are bipartisan.

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This post appeared In LA Progressive and was republished with their permission.