Injustice takes many forms. After 20 years in US custody, most of that time spent in Guantánamo, you could say I am an expert.
It may surprise you to know that I think America has a very good justice system. But it is only for Americans. In the cases of those like me, justice is not something that interests the US. I wish that people understood how Guantánamo is distinct.
In Guantánamo, the torture we are exposed to is not isolated to the interrogation rooms; it exists in our daily lives. This intentional psychological torture is what makes Guantánamo different. There is interference in every aspect of my existence – my sleep, my food, my walking.… Seguir leyendo »
During his presidential campaign, Donald Trump made a pledge to fill the American detention center at Guantánamo Bay with “bad dudes.” He brought up Guantánamo again on Nov. 1, a day after the Uzbek immigrant Sayfullo Saipov was arrested on a charge of killing eight people in a terror attack in New York. Mr. Trump said that authorities should send the suspect to the prison because the American justice system is a “laughingstock.”
But the next day Mr. Trump apparently changed his mind, indicating a preference for trying Mr. Saipov in New York. He said in a tweet that he’d “love” to send him to Guantánamo but “that process takes much longer than going through the federal system.”… Seguir leyendo »
This week, we have seen reports that a former British inmate of Guantanamo Bay, Jamal Udeen al-Harith, carried out an ISIS suicide attack in Iraq.
Some will undoubtedly use this news to make the argument that Guantanamo Bay should remain open, that it should be increasingly used to house the current crop of jihadist terrorists and that no further inmates should be released.
Indeed, President Donald Trump has made some of these arguments, and Republicans have put pressure on him to expand the prison in Cuba.
No one is more outraged than me, a counter-extremism specialist, by the reports that a former Guantanamo prisoner joined ISIS and carried out this attack.… Seguir leyendo »
Instead of blocking President Obama’s efforts to close the costly Guantánamo Bay detention facility, Congress should be working with him to finally shut it down.
I’ve been to Guantánamo twice, once in 2002, with the former defense secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and other senators, and again in 2013, with Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, and Denis R. McDonough, the White House chief of staff.
Seeing the facility firsthand reinforces my belief in the great need to close this prison, which has cost us billions of dollars and is a real threat to our national security.
Simply put, Guantánamo is one of the best propaganda tools that terrorists have today.… Seguir leyendo »
When President Barack Obama announced his intention to close the Guantanamo Bay detention center on his second day in office, he sounded serious.
He was flanked by more than a dozen retired military leaders, who’d all urged him to close the facility because it had become a virtual recruitment tool for terrorists and a stain on the United States’ reputation for upholding human rights and the rule of law. Obama also had the support of national-security experts across the political spectrum when he signed his historic executive order.
More than six years later, the U.S. facility in Cuba is still open.… Seguir leyendo »
Before the “war on terror,” many Americans knew about Guantanamo Bay only from its depiction in “A Few Good Men.” In the film’s most famous scene, the Marine colonel who commands the U.S. naval base, played by Jack Nicholson, declares during a court-martial: “I have neither the time nor the inclination to explain myself to a man who rises and sleeps under the blanket of the very freedom that I provide and then questions the manner in which I provide it.”
We have been told that holding prisoners at Guantanamo for more than a decade is a necessary price for freedom.… Seguir leyendo »
When I began as the State Department’s envoy for closing the detention facility at Guantánamo Bay, many people advised me that progress was impossible. They were wrong.
In the two years before I started, on July 1, 2013, only four people were transferred from Guantánamo. Over the past 18 months, we moved 39 people out of there, and more transfers are coming. The population at Guantánamo — 127 — is at its lowest level since the facility opened in January 2002. We also worked with Congress to remove unnecessary obstacles to foreign transfers. We began an administrative process to review the status of detainees not yet approved for transfer or formally charged with crimes.… Seguir leyendo »
Estados Unidos, hoy, tiene más de dos millones de reclusos. Entre ellos no se contabilizan los 137 que quedan en la prisión de Guantánamo, como ninguno de los que les antecedieron en la misma. Seguramente aquellos presos oficiales no sufrirán las técnicas de tortura que han padecido los denominados enemigos encerrados en una isla de impunidad bajo el Programa de Rendición, Detención e Interrogatorio, creado por George W. Bush, el 17 de septiembre del 2001 y que permitió a la CIA desarrollar métodos como el waterboarding (ahogamiento simulado), walling (golpear contra el muro), humillaciones y violencia sexual, golpes, amenazas de muerte, privación de sueño, “hidratación y alimentación rectal”, entre otras, en forma sistemática, hasta el cierre de ese siniestro programa en el 2009 por orden del presidente Obama, quien, sin embargo, no exigió al fiscal general que abriera ninguna investigación pero sí pidió “comprensión” para los torturadores.… Seguir leyendo »
Of all the hangovers from the George W. Bush years, the thorniest may be what to do about the U.S. military prison camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. There are still 171 detainees at Guantanamo and little consensus on what to do with them. Last spring, President Obama announced the resumption of military trials for some of those charged with participating in the 9/11 attacks. These trials, known as military commissions, have been stalled for years by legal challenges. Recently, the official in charge of the Guantanamo prison, Rear Adm. David Woods, issued a draft order that compounds these challenges. The order requires all correspondence between the accused and their appointed military lawyers to be reviewed by federal officials.… Seguir leyendo »
This week marks the 10th anniversary of the opening of the U.S. detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and the hand-wringing is in high gear. There have been op-eds by former detainees, a statement by retired military personnel, denunciations of President Obama for his failure to close the site and tear-stained statements by human rights groups.
In a decade of policy experimentation at Guantanamo, some efforts have succeeded, some have failed tragically and some are still in process. But far more interesting than the past 10 years is what the next 10 will look like. And that subject seems oddly absent from the current conversation.… Seguir leyendo »
Ten years after its opening, mention Guantanamo, and a thousand images emerge. Men in orange jumpsuits wearing goggles, hoods and handcuffs, hunched over in the relentless Caribbean sun; zoo-like cages, exposed to the elements, with nothing but buckets as toilets; secret areas of the prison compound where “enhanced interrogation techniques” were tested; a detainee deprived of sleep, and injected forcibly with fluids to cause swelling, until he broke; men found hanging from ropes in their cells.
What would a world without Guantanamo be like? That’s two questions, really. First, one must imagine a world in which the detention facility had never opened its doors.… Seguir leyendo »
When Sen. Joseph McCarthy told the Ohio County Women's Republican Club of Wheeling, W.Va., on Feb. 9, 1950, that he held a list of 205 communists employed by the State Department, he ignited a firestorm and launched a career.
We now know there was no list. Even then, it was obvious McCarthy was not particularly punctilious about the numbers. In Wheeling it was 205; in Salt Lake City it was 57; on the Senate floor it was 81. Nor was he especially careful about the allegation. Maybe they weren't all "card-carrying" communists.… Seguir leyendo »
In the 10 years since the Guantánamo detention camp opened, the anguished debate over whether to shutter the facility — or make it permanent — has obscured a deeper failure that dates back more than a century and implicates all Americans: namely, our continued occupation of Guantánamo itself. It is past time to return this imperialist enclave to Cuba.
From the moment the United States government forced Cuba to lease the Guantánamo Bay naval base to us, in June 1901, the American presence there has been more than a thorn in Cuba’s side. It has served to remind the world of America’s long history of interventionist militarism.… Seguir leyendo »
I left Guantánamo Bay much as I had arrived almost five years earlier — shackled hand-to-waist, waist-to-ankles, and ankles to a bolt on the airplane floor. My ears and eyes were goggled, my head hooded, and even though I was the only detainee on the flight this time, I was drugged and guarded by at least 10 soldiers. This time though, my jumpsuit was American denim rather than Guantánamo orange. I later learned that my C-17 military flight from Guantánamo to Ramstein Air Base in my home country, Germany, cost more than $1 million.
When we landed, the American officers unshackled me before they handed me over to a delegation of German officials.… Seguir leyendo »
In his inaugural address, President Obama called on us to “reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals.” We agree. Now, to protect both, he must veto the National Defense Authorization Act that Congress is expected to pass this week.
This budget bill — which can be vetoed without cutting financing for our troops — is both misguided and unnecessary: the president already has the power and flexibility to effectively fight terrorism.
One provision would authorize the military to indefinitely detain without charge people suspected of involvement with terrorism, including United States citizens apprehended on American soil. Due process would be a thing of the past.… Seguir leyendo »
The prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, is again in the news. The two Americans released this month by Iran have reported that when they complained about conditions in their Tehran prison, the jailers would "immediately remind us of comparable conditions at Guantanamo Bay." Such is the power of symbols.
Symbols are important, and we ignore them at our peril. But even in these hyperpartisan times, when symbols are baseball bats used by thugs in the public square to beat reason senseless, I like to pretend that the truth is worth pursuing. And one part of that truth is that conditions at Guantanamo are vastly superior to those at any maximum-security prison on the U.S.… Seguir leyendo »
Barack Obama's first executive order when he was made president called for the closure of Guantánamo Bay as quickly as possible. He didn't follow through immediately when he had the chance – when he was still riding high on his election victory and the world was in love with him. Instead, he tried to work with the Republicans to create a bipartisan solution, an effort which failed dismally.
Now, with the killing of Osama bin Laden, President Obama again has a window in which to close this prison. Indeed, it could even be a shrewd political move, a demonstration to a world which is questioning the legality of Bin Laden's killing that the president has a handle on what is right.… Seguir leyendo »
George Orwell is usually a footsure guide across political battlegrounds. In late 1943, when the tide had turned in the Allies’ favor, he wrote about postwar trials. Oddly, he advocated Hitler and Mussolini slipping away. His verdict for them would not be death unless the Germans and Italians themselves carried out summary executions (as they eventually did in Mussolini’s case).
He wanted “no martyrizing, no St. Helena business.” Above all, he disdained the idea of a “solemn hypocritical ‘trial of war criminals,’ with all the slow cruel pageantry of the law, which after a lapse of time has so strange a way of focusing a romantic light on the accused and turning a scoundrel into a hero.”… Seguir leyendo »
The system of military commissions that will try Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and four other alleged 9/11 plotters contains a dirty little secret. Hardly anybody talks about it, but it's a key reason for concern as the apparatus becomes established.
It is this: The commissions can operate inside the United States, and they have jurisdiction over a broad range of crimes. Nothing in the Military Commissions Act limits the military trials to Guantanamo detainees, or to people captured and held abroad, or even to terrorism suspects. Nothing prevents the commissions from trying noncitizens, arrested inside the country, whom the president unilaterally designates as "unprivileged enemy belligerents."… Seguir leyendo »
It’s official. Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the self-proclaimed mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, will be tried by a military commission at Guantanamo Bay.
He will not be tried in Manhattan in the shadow of the World Trade Center. He will not be tried before the vast majority of the victims’ families. Nor will he be tried in any federal court. Instead, he will be tried offshore in a military commission process established in 2009 and yet to be tested. It is likely that he will be convicted of conspiring to plan and commit the attacks of 9/11 and that, he, along with his four co-defendants, the other 9/11 detainees at Guantanamo, will be given life sentences, if not the death penalty.… Seguir leyendo »
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