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In September 2007, Karen Greenberg ominously titled her third report for TomDispatch "Guantanamo Forever." Give her credit. So many years ago, she grasped all too clearly the nightmarish nature of that bastion of injustice. Sixteen years and three presidencies later, 21 years after that offshore prison from hell was founded by President George W. Bush and crew, it's hard (as you'll see with today's piece) not to simply use that title again.
As I wrote in my introduction to her piece then,
"As the presidential election season heats up, Republican candidates have opted for 'Guantanamo-forever' policy positions. Retiring Republican Senator Chuck Hagel recently complained that the notorious detention facility once the proud public face of the President's attempt to move incarceration and mistreatment offshore and beyond the reach of American courts has bizarrely enough become 'a Republican litmus test.' At the same time, at Guantanamo itself, anger and factionalism are on the rise, not among prisoners but warders, while the attempt to set up what Wall Street Journal reporter Jess Bravin calls 'a free-standing court system to try alleged foreign terrorists' founders for the nine hundredth time. More than five years after being inaugurated, the prison complex has so far adjudicated exactly one case to the point of conviction a simple plea bargain (essentially negotiated between President Bush and Australian Prime Minister John Howard) that transferred small-fry Taliban follower David Hicks back to Australia where he is to be freed at the end of this year."
It's true, as Greenberg notes, that those offshore military commission trials of leftover Gitmo prisoners are finally proceeding in their forever fashion and perhaps someday that prison will indeed be no more. But when it comes to the fallout from this country's endless war on terror, which turned into an endless war of terror, some things never seem to end. After all, only now is Congress even considering the possibility of taking back from the president the power to make war globally, thanks to that Authorization for the Use of Military Force, or AUMF, it passed three days after the 9/11 attacks (with but a single negative vote, that of the remarkable Barbara Lee), and the one it passed in 2002 before the invasion of Iraq and never rescinded. And don't count on that happening either!
The question of whether those forever wars and the forever prison that went with them will ever be truly ended still remains up for grabs, but let TomDispatch regular Karen Greenberg explain so many years (and articles) later. Tom
Closing Guanta'namo?
Yes, a Snail's Pace" but a Pace
For 18 years, I've been writing articles for TomDispatch on the never-ending story of the Guanta'namo Bay Detention Facility. And here's my ultimate takeaway (for the moment): 21 years after that grim offshore prison of injustice was set up in Cuba in response to the 9/11 attacks and the capture of figures supposedly linked to them, and despite the expressed desire of three presidents George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Joe Biden to close it, the endgame remains devastatingly elusive.
At times due to a failure of will, at times due to a failure of the system itself or the sheer complexity of the logistics involved, and at times due to acts of Congress or the courts, efforts to shut that prison have been eternally stymied. Despite endless acknowledgements that what's gone on there has defied domestic, international, and military law not to mention longstanding norms of morality and justice that prison persists.
Recently, however, for those of us perpetually looking for a ray or even a glimmer of hope, there have finally been a few developments that seem to signal steps, however tiny, toward closure.
There are still 30 detainees at Guanta'namo. Sixteen of them have been deemed no longer threats to the United States and cleared for release, but arrangements have yet to be made to transfer them to another country. Three others are considered too dangerous for release. And eleven have been charged in the military commissions system that was set up in 2006 and revised under President Obama in 2009. One, Ali Hamza Ahmad Suliman al-Bahlul, has been convicted. Another, Abd al-Hadi al-Iraqi, recently pleaded guilty. Now, nine detainees face trials in three separate cases. All of them were tortured at CIA "black sites" for different periods of time between 2003 and 2006.
Progress in the Biden years has been occurring, even if at a snail's pace. His administration has said that it intends to close Guanta'namo by the end of his term. And in the last two and a half years, it has indeed reduced the population from 40 to 30, the most recent transfer of a freed prisoner to another country occurring this April. In addition, the Biden administration increased the total number of remaining detainees eligible for release from six to its current 16.
Arranging such transfers has proven painstaking work, requiring complex negotiations with foreign countries, as well as assurances to American officials and ultimately Congress that the release will pose no future threat to the United States and that the prisoner will be treated justly in the receiving country. Those releases have been complicated because, after Obama announced at the outset of his presidency that Guanta'namo would close within a year, Congress banned any Gitmo detainee from ever being transferred to the United States for any purpose whatsoever, a ban that's been re-authorized every year since then.
While those detainees cleared for release await transfer to other countries, developments over the past few months have put the military commissions in the forefront of activities aimed at closure.
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