Closing Guantanamo Bay?

 by Diarmuid Bailey

The discussion surrounding the US prison of Guantanamo Bay detention camp has been incessant since its opening almost 22 years ago. Every president, including George W Bush, has promised to close this chapter in the base's History; they have failed every time to shut it down and ended up extending its lifetime leaving 30 prisoners there as of 2023, 2 years after the formal end of the war in Afghanistan. 

Shortly after the commencement of the War on Terror in October 2001, Bush launched the hunt for Al Qaeda members offering a cash reward. This caused many Afghans to take interest and supplied the US with hundreds of potential terrorists with very little evidence on them being involved in the organisation. The US sent them to other secret prisons, called black sites, in order to interrogate these suspects however there was not enough room to sustain the current volume of prisoners. This was where the hunt for Guantanamo began as a permanent solution to store hundreds of ‘Dangerous prisoners’. To answer this, Guantanamo Bay was created and opened on January 11th 2002. It began operation as a grey area in law allowing for the ill treatment of suspected terrorists and acted as a purgatory for them. The location of Guantanamo was chosen by the Bush administration due to the Department of Justice highlighting it as ‘outside of US legal jurisdiction’,providing special permissions in which to operate and allowed for the CIA and Joint Task Force Guantanamo (JTF-GTMO) to employ enhanced interrogation techniques. The Secretary of Defence at the time commented that ‘The detention camp was established to detain extraordinarily dangerous people, to interrogate detainees in an optimal setting, and to prosecute detainees for war crimes’; this reason kept support for the prison up during the early years but this quickly turned into suspicion after the war in Afghanistan came to a plateau. In practice this place has become a storehouse for prisoners the US government wants to hide away. Moreover none of those sent to Guantanamo have ever faced a civilian court room.

One example of the horrific nature of Guantanamo is Moath Al-Alwi who was deemed too dangerous to be set free, staying in the prison for two decades, without any evidence against him or a trial to face a jury. This was not an exception amongst the 540 prisoners that were detained in Guantanamo. There are two myths for where the residents of Guantanamo were from; one is that they are all ‘harden terrorist intent on destroying the American way’, the other is that they were all shepherds. Dan Fried came up with a bell curve. At one end were the hardened terrorists, such as Ali Al-Bahlul, the other were people who were swept up and shouldn't have been there at all, for example Uigher Men. The amount of information gathered about each case was so minimal the army just took everyone they could and detained them in Guantanamo. 

At the peak of its inhabitants, shortly after January 2002, none of the 679 prisoners were charged with a crime and it was this that made Guantanamo most appealing. This is where the controversy lies as the US claimed that they could detain these prisoners without formally charging them and therefore not risk losing a case in which a potential terrorist got free. Bush felt that the US prison system gave too many rights to ‘These very, very, dangerous people’, there was a view that the old rules needed to be thrown out and a harsher line taken. It was also argued that Guantanamo fell outside of international law, although over 190 countries signed the Geneva convention of 1949, but for those laws to apply, the US needed to recognise them as prisoners of war and so they never did. The US was so afraid of a new terrorist threat that they insisted on getting as much information on the perpetrators of the last attack as they could, which propelled them into a dark world of interrigation and torture. Guantanamos ‘grey phrasing’ didn't stop at law. In order to pass them off as not criminals or prisoners of war the US government coined a new phrase, “Unlawful Enemy Combatants”. The US claimed that they could hold these combatants without charges in Guantanamo indefinitely and the detainees couldn't challenge it in court. This lack of rights or voice remains a continuous echo into the present day as one of the many wrongdoings within Guantanamo Bay. The US claims to be a staple of freedom and human rights around the world, some might say a poster boy to the many countries struggling, but they founded a cruel institution by taking advantage of grey areas of the law and exploiting them to their own benefit with no external contol over their power or balance. The voice that they did give to the detainees, through the use of military courts, was so weighted towards the US winning that it went as far as abolishing criminal representation to the detainees and not allowing them to submit evidence in a counter to their case.

Even without looking at the extensive human rights abuses that occurred in Guantanamo, it certainly worked as a great recruitment tool for terror organisations. As soon as videos emerged of men on the ground hooded, the number of people favouring the Taliban and Al Qaeda in Afghanistan rose, damaging the war and hurting the US’s angelic ideals. Guantanamo was designed to be an institution that operated outside of the rules of law. This in itself was a reason to close down the prison and to change the way the US approached the Afghan conflict as a whole. It seemed to be a capture or kill mission for every person related to Al Qaeda. The objective of Afghanistan was lost almost immediately and it turned into a war of revenge not liberation., Guantanamo did not help with this view and it only aided the ideals that fueled the Taliban and Al Qaeda, even growing the number of domestic terror threats. 

However, in a series of decisions the Supreme court stepped in and passed a number of resolutions around Guantanamo. It gave the prisoners a voice and entitled them to federal courts giving them a way to return home. This forced the Bush administration to review each case and set up a transfer process to enable the smooth transition into this new format. Over a 5 year period these transfers sent 532 detainees back to Afghanistan and convicted 3 through military courts, 5 prisoners died in the prison. After this mass exodus 242 detainees remained in Guantanamo when Bush left office and Obama took control with hopes that the prison was closing down. In January 2009 Obama announced that ‘Guantanamo will be closed no later than 2010.’. This meant that the detainees were split into three groups; the first group would be released to their home countries or to third party countries, a second group would be tried in US court, the third was left in Guantanamo. This gave a glimpse of hope to those kept in the inhumane location, but this was short-lived. The Obama administration folded and gave up on those who were kept there. Over the 8 years of the administration they transferred 197 and convicted 5 in military courts and again 4 more died in incarceration. This left 91 prisoners in Guantanamo and it was these 91 that president Donald Trump labelled as the worst of humanity. The sheer lack of humanity shown by the United States to people they said were the killers of millions took their argument and blew it to pieces. Many argued, especially in the UN, that the US was no better than those it kept in Guantanamo.

By throwing out the rule book in a fit of rage the US has had to face the world with Guantanamo on its record claiming 10 lives and ruining hundreds more through torture and inhumane conditions. The US Government has come to regret the opening of Guantanamo in 2002. Today in 2023 10 detainees are awaiting prosecution by the military courts whilst 20 others have their fates yet to be decided. Guantanamo will always be a sore reminder in the history of the United States as its most divisive decision during the war on terror and the negotiation it has continued to foster even after troops disengaged on 30th September 2023. Whilst it was a promise of Biden’s administration to close the prison, as we roll around to the next election it seems as though this was a disingenuous promise and Guantanamo looks to be staying open for the foreseeable future to come.