The Guantanamo Bay detention camp, or Gitmo/GTMO, is a United States detention facility within the Guantanamo Bay naval base, located in southeastern Cuba. The prison opened in 2002, under the Bush administration, in response to the terror attacks at the World Trade Center on 9/11. Since it’s opening, the prison has housed nearly 800 detainees.
At its initial opening, Gitmo received many Al-Qaeda and Taliban militants. Over time, prisoners from a handful of countries, such as Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and Yemen, were transferred to the prison. The prison was created to detain extremely dangerous terrorists and prosecute them for war crimes.
However, in reality, the prison has been well known to hold detainees indefinitely and torture them, without being charged and without being given the legal means to call into question their detention.
In 2006, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled against the Bush administration’s handling of war crimes trials for the Gitmo detainees, ruling that the “proposed trials for Guantanamo detainees were illegal under U.S. law and international Geneva conventions”. Soon after, the Military Commission Act restored the legality of the facility and denied the federal courts jurisdiction to hear habeas corpus petitions on behalf of the detainees. Two years later, this was overturned and the court recognized the ability for a detainee to challenge their detention in a federal court.
Still, many of the detainees were unable to leave the camp, even after their release because no country allowed them entry. Seeing this issue, several humanitarian organizations rebuked the camp.
Finally, in 2008, Barack Obama was elected president, and only two days after his inauguration, he vowed to close the camp within a year. Obama also signed an executive order that banned cruel interrogation techniques (which didn’t make any impact, as the torturing never stopped). Throughout his presidency, the administration successfully transferred many detainees to other facilities or released them to their home countries.
It has been over eight years since then, but the camp is still open, continues to house detainees without a charge, and inhumanely tortures them. Why can’t it just be closed?
Here’s why: After the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that federal courts could determine the legality of a detainee’s imprisonment, the Bush administration signed the Detainee Treatment Act (DTA) to avoid allowing the detainees the right to trials in U.S. federal courts.
And when Obama became president, he adopted the Bush administration’s “global war on terror” paradigm under the Authorization for Use of Military Force, which makes it lawful to hold a detainee indefinitely and gives the executive branch the power to determine the legality of these detentions, rather than the judiciary.
The Obama administration recognized the hole they put themselves in when they openly stated they couldn’t close the facility because of Congress’ passage of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which Obama signed. The act “prohibits any transfer of any Guantanamo Bay detainee to a country where returnees have re-engaged in terrorist activity and require certification from the receiving country that it has taken steps to prevent such activity.”
Thomas Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.” So why is it that the Gitmo detainees have been stripped of these so-called rights?
United Nations and other international bodies, including the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRS) and the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights have voiced their concerns stating that the “four Geneva Conventions apply to the Guantanamo prisoners as well as international human rights treaties. These prohibit torture, cruel and inhuman treatment, and indefinite detention without trial, and require prompt and fair trials for all prisoners.”
The real question is this: Is it the law that is preventing the closure of Gitmo or is the lack of the application of the law from presidential administrations?
Thus far, it seems that it is the latter. One can only hope that the injustice for the Gitmo detainees ends and that this administration can see that through.
