Guantanamo, Tip of the Iceberg
By Sara Kuepfer Thakkar for ISN
One of US President Barack Obama’s most publicized and internationally applauded first acts upon coming into office was his external pageexecutive orderto shut down the detention center at Guantanamo Bay within a year.
The prison at Guantanamo Bay had become a symbol of American abuse of Muslims, a convenient recruiting tool for al-Qaida, and thus a real liability for a war that ultimately can only be won by securing the support of Muslims around the world.
The deadline for closing Guantanamo, which expires today, has not been met.
The difficulty in finding suitable host countries for former Guantanamo inmates and the temporary freeze on the repatriation of Yemeni detainees (who make up half of Guantanamo’s prison population) are slowing down the Obama administration’s efforts.
In mid-December, the administration announced that some prisoners would be sent to a federal facility in Thomson, Illinois, while five other detainees would face a civilian trial in New York.
But the majority of detainees will likely remain in a legal limbo state indefinitely. The evidence for convicting them is too feeble; yet, they are deemed too dangerous to be released.
The case of Guantanamo Bay is becoming another indication of how little has changed during the first year of the Obama administration. It gives weight to the argument that Obama has essentially adopted many of Bush’s counterterrorism policies, considering that Bush had already been taking steps to close Guantanamo and modified the system of military commissions during his second term.
Meanwhile, new torture allegations at Guantanamo are surfacing. In a disturbing external pagearticlepublished by Harper’s magazine on Monday, Scott Horton investigates three mysterious “suicides” allegedly committed by Guantanamo inmates in June 2006. As Horton explains, the military’s narrative of the reported suicides is implausible and does not jibe with other evidence. Drawing on testimonies of officers who were on duty during the night of the three deaths, Horton concludes that the prisoners most likely suffocated during aggressive interrogation at a secret facility that involved stuffing rags in their throats.
Not the deaths themselves, but their continued cover-up by the military and various US government agencies, implicate the Obama administration, which has refused to thoroughly investigate the 2006 alleged suicides and other alleged crimes committed inside US detention facilities.
The system is broken. No talk of “change” will ever rectify that.
True change can only come about by first finding out what kind of abuses have happened inside terrorist detention facilities, and how they have been allowed to happen. The Obama administration needs to eliminate every loophole and secret directive that could be understood as a green light to engage in immoral and illegal practices. Anything less would not be true “change,” but simple tinkering with policies that have been wrong-headed from the beginning.
Obama has not abolished the Bush-era system of military commissions, nor has he found a new answer to the problem of preventive detention.
Meanwhile, the US continues to external pagemaintain unsupervised military detention facilities in Afghanistan (such as at Bagram Air Base) and elsewhere, where suspected terrorists are held beyond the reach of the US justice system. Considering their continued existence, new cases of prisoner abuse are just waiting to happen.
The world needs to be reassured that torture is no longer happening at American detention facilities, no matter where in the world they are located. And Americans themselves need to be able to trust their legal system and their government again.