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For more than 18 years, Karen Greenberg has been writing about the crimes the U.S. committed at its offshore prison of injustice at Guanta'namo Bay, Cuba. It would be, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld assured Americans, "the least worst place" (a phrase Greenberg turned into the title of her book on the subject). Sorry, Don, but that was only true if you were comparing it to the "black sites" the CIA was already running then. From the moment it was set up in 2002, with the Global War on Terror just months old and the first (often already tortured prisoners) sent there, bound, hooded, and in fluorescent orange jumpsuits to be brutally mistreated beyond the shores of American justice, that prison has been a horror beyond compare. And as Greenberg showed in those years, the rest of us could have known just what was happening.
Here's just one Guanta'namo quote from the time: "On a couple of occasions, I entered interview rooms to find a detainee chained hand and foot in a fetal position to the floor, with no chair, food or water. Most times they had urinated or defecated on themselves, and had been left there for 18, 24 hours or more." That was, in fact, typical of descriptions outraged FBI agents assigned to Gitmo in 2004 sent in memos or emails to their bosses back on the mainland. They confirmed prisoner claims that "military personnel beat and kicked them while they had hoods on their heads and tight shackles on their legs, left them in freezing temperatures and stifling heat, subjected them to repeated, prolonged rectal exams and paraded them naked around the prison as military police snapped pictures," and so it went.
From that prison's very first day, when the initial 20 prisoners were flown in and, about a week later, the first publicity if you dare call it that! photo taken of them was released, as New York Times reporter Carol Rosenberg recalled, it looked "like torture." (The full set of photos, available years later, proved to be a first-class horror show.) Today, TomDispatch regular Greenberg, who has visited that prison and covered its horrors for endless years, considers the latest reports on the all-American nightmare that's simply never ended. Tom
The Forever War's Forever Legacy
Shutting Down Gitmo Is Hardly the Last Step
There can be little question that the grim prison at Guanta'namo Bay, Cuba, which still shows no sign of closing anytime soon, is a key legacy in the worst sense imaginable of America's post-9/11 forever wars. I've been covering the subject for decades now and that shameful legacy has never diminished.
Last month, in response to a column I wrote for TomDispatch one of dozens, I'm sad to say, that I've done on Guanta'namo over these endless years I received a surprise email: an invitation to attend a meeting at the British Parliament. A group known as the All Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) for Closing the Guantanamo Bay Detention Facility, formed this April, was gathering for the second time. Its stated purpose is "to urge the U.S. administration to close the Guanta'namo Bay detention facility, to ensure the safe resettlement of those approved for release, and to ensure that due process is expedited for all the remaining prisoners." Nine members of the House of Parliament and four Members of the House of Lords have already joined the group.
Thirty men remain in custody at that infamous American prison in Guanta'namo Bay, Cuba. Sixteen of those detainees have finally been cleared for release; they are, that is, no longer subject to criminal charges or considered a potential danger to the United States and yet they still remain behind bars. Three other prisoners have never either been charged with a crime or cleared for release. Ten more are still facing trial, while one has been convicted and remains in custody there. For the APPG, the release of those 16 cleared detainees is a paramount goal.
That meeting I attended included a handful of MPs from all parties, as well as leading figures from British organizations that have been supporting justice for Guanta'namo's detainees for decades. Also present were two former detainees. One was Moazzem Begg, among the first prisoners released in 2005 and repatriated to England, where he is now a senior director at CAGE, an advocacy group focused on the remaining Gitmo detainees. In 2006, he published Enemy Combatant: My Imprisonment at Guantanamo, Bagram, and Kandahar, an early account of the injustices and cruelties in America's war-on-terror prisons. The other was Mohamedou Salahi, whose book Guanta'namo Diary led to the dramatic film The Mauritanian about his life at that infamous prison. A third former detainee, Mansoor Adayfi, author of Don't Forget Us Here, had been transferred from Gitmo to Serbia in 2016. Though invited to attend, his visa wasn't approved in time.
That meeting was but one of several recent events in which organizations outside the United States have issued detailed impassioned calls for this country to finally address the ongoing nightmare it created so long ago at Guanta'namo.
Site Visits and U.N. Reports
In April, Patrick Hamilton, the head of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), made a site visit to Guanta'namo and issued "a rare statement of alarm." It was, as New York Times reporter Carol Rosenberg pointed out, the ICRC's 146th visit to the prison since it opened in January 2002. That short statement urged American officials to address the deteriorating health of the prisoners there, concluding, "The planning for an aging population," it concluded, "cannot afford to wait.".
Then, in mid-June, the U.N. Human Rights Council followed up its own site visit by issuing a comprehensive, devastatingly critical report. Fionnuala Ni Aola'in, that council's special rapporteur on the promotion and protection of human rights and fundamental freedoms while countering terrorism, focused on the potential war crimes and "crimes against humanity" committed against the detainees during and after their time at that island prison, now in its 21st year of existence.
Ni Aola'in was the perfect person for the job. She's long defended human rights and international law, with a particular focus on issues of justice and human dignity. In 2013, she co-edited Guanta'namo and Beyond: Exceptional Courts and Military Commissions in Comparative Perspective. Her 2023 report, clear, fact-based, and measured in tone, is in many ways a step above that of any of its predecessors.
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