On the 20th Anniversary of Its Establishment; Calls to Close the Notorious Guantanamo Prison

On the twentieth anniversary of its establishment, international, human rights and parliamentary calls for the US administration to close the Guantanamo prison, which witnessed many human rights violations over the course of two decades, under the pretext of the war on terror that followed the events of September 11, 2001.

Independent experts delegated by the United Nations, representatives in the German parliament and Amnesty International called on US President Joe Biden to fulfill his promise to close the Guantanamo prison, which, according to their description, has become an indelible stain on America's international reputation in the context of respect for human rights.

While human rights advocates for closing it say that the US military detention facility represents two decades of injustice, it was intended to deprive those who were arrested - all Muslims - after the September 11 attacks of the constitutional rights they enjoy on US soil.

In early January 2002, the administration of President George W. Bush established a prison in a forgotten US base on the southern coast of Cuba to free itself of a law of war that it claimed did not apply to terrorists.

Over the past years, there has been repeated talk about closing Guantanamo Bay, several US administrations made promises to do so, but everything remained the same.

Is the closing date of the Guantanamo prison really approaching, or is the issue a legal dilemma for which a solution will not be known?

 

20 Years of Arbitrary Detention

On January 11, 2022, a group of human rights activists gathered in Washington, DC, to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the establishment of the Guantanamo Bay detention camp.

Several activists dressed in orange prison uniforms with black hoods on their heads echoing long-held images of the American concentration camp.

The participants called on US President Joe Biden to close the facility and release the remaining prisoners.

In a joint statement on January 10, 2022, independent experts from the United Nations called on the United States to close the Guantanamo prison, as press reports indicated that there were continuous violations of human rights within its walls, in the context of the so-called war on terror in the aftermath of the attacks of September 11, 2001.

“20 years of arbitrary detention without trial, accompanied by torture or ill-treatment, is simply unacceptable for any government, especially for a government that claims to protect human rights,” the experts said.

Independent experts have described the detention center as a legal black hole and a stain on the United States' commitment to justice and law.

They stressed the need to prosecute those responsible for the acts of torture that detainees have been subjected to for two decades.

The experts appealed to the United States to close this repressive facility from the ongoing human rights violations, as well as repatriating detainees who are still in Guantanamo or sending them to safe third countries, and compensating them for acts of torture and arbitrary arrests.

Nine detainees have died in Guantanamo during the past twenty years, including seven people who the US authorities said have committed suicide, without following up these cases judicially, according to the experts' report.

It is noteworthy that since 2002, a total of 780 people have spent years in arbitrary detention camps at the US Guantanamo base, the majority of those detained were released after serving periods of detention of at least 10 years, without bringing them any judicial charge, and without offering any apology or compensation to any of them.

According to the report, the number of detainees currently held in Guantanamo has decreased to 39, and 27 of them are still awaiting the start of judicial proceedings against them.

It is noteworthy that Barack Obama tried to close the Guantanamo prison during his presidency, but failed to do so as a result of the Republican obstruction of the decision to close the facility, as for Donald Trump, he opposed the decision to close the prison during his presidency.

However, Joe Biden has promised to close the prison, as did his godfather Obama, but he has not taken any significant steps so far.

Since Biden took office, only one Guantanamo prisoner has left in July 2021, it is Moroccan Abdellatif Nasser, who had been released under the Obama administration in 2016, but the Trump administration later suspended the implementation of the decision.

On January 5, the US administration announced plans to build a new courtroom in Guantanamo to continue the work of the military commissions, which completely contradicts the plan to close the aforementioned place, according to what was stated by Pentagon spokesman John Kirby earlier.

 

Brutal Excesses

In parallel with the call of United Nations experts, representatives from several parties in the German parliament demanded the US administration to close the Guantanamo prison, which has existed for 20 years.

 

According to Deutsche Welle (DW), it came in a letter signed by 14 members of Parliament and published on January 10: “The torture center in Guantanamo have become a symbol of the brutal excesses of the American fight against terrorism.”

In their letter, the representatives called on the US president to protect the rights of all prisoners and to permanently close the detention camp in Cuba.

Guantanamo is a notorious prison where none of the human rights laws apply to it, to the point that Amnesty International says the US prison at Guantanamo represents the barbarism of our times.

Amnesty International indicated in a report on January 10, that “most of Guantanamo prisoners were kidnapped from their families and brutally tortured in secret prisons run by the United States and the so-called allies in the war on terror; in Guantanamo they were tortured, and none of them had a fair trial.

“The United States should close Guantanamo prison, acknowledge the abuses that occurred there and provide reparations,” said Daphne Eviatar, an expert at Amnesty International USA.

In an Amnesty International report on Guantanamo, the expert added: “The American prison is one of the flagrant violations of human rights, racism, Islamophobia and impunity for torture.”

“Biden will not have real credibility if he does not close the Guantanamo prison while calling on other countries to respect human rights,” Eviatar added.

In turn, lawyer and political writer Zaid al-Azem said in a statement to Al-Estiklal: “Guantanamo Bay is not only an indelible stain on America’s international reputation, it is a stain on humanity.”

“That humanity is the same that had approved in 1945 the Charter of Respect for Human Rights in the United States, which considered the detained human being, even if he was a criminal, to be treated in a dignified and not humiliating manner,” he added.

“Since 2001 and to this day, human rights organizations, including Amnesty International, are still calling on the US government to close this notorious prison,” al-Azem affirmed.

“The punishment in all the constitutions of countries that respect human rights is a means of reform and not a means of abuse, torture and the practice of sadism, which is considered part of the atrocities suffered by Guantanamo detainees,” the lawyer noted.

“Guantanamo prison did not achieve the principle of reform, discipline, and dismantling the extremist ideas of the prisoners who were detained there, because the punishment was not actually converted into a well-studied psychological human rights approach in order to return and prepare these prisoners,” al-Azem also pointed out.

“What confirms my words is that Guantanamo prison was established on the ruins of the Afghanistan war in 2001, but there are new organizations that are stronger and more dangerous in thought than the old ones in terms of criminal acts - like the rise of ISIS in 2013 - that have appeared in different parts of the world,” al-Azem said.

From another point of view, lawyer Hassan Alaswad, Secretary General of the Syrian Council for Change, said in a statement to Al-Estiklal that “it is not possible, in terms of the result, to say whether the United States has been able to dismantle the extremist ideas of the prisoners in which it has detained them, or not, because the matter is not limited to these people only, but its effects extend to an entire generation of young people who saw in the American curriculum as a reason to fight the West in general, this has doubled the possibilities of their tendency towards extremism more than before.”

“Although the United States established the Guantanamo prison outside the borders of its territory to avoid legal embarrassment before the international community, but this file remained a disgrace on its forehead, as it was a clear expression of the extreme arrogance and unlimited ecstasy that the United States felt after the collapse of the socialist camp,” the lawyer pointed out.

“The goals that the United States sought in establishing the Guantanamo prison and inflicting the most severe forms of torture against its prisoners have certainly caused severe damage to the reputation of this country, which has long been proud of being one of the bastions of democracy and basic human rights,” Alaswad added.

 

Legal Black Hole

On its part, the Guardian newspaper revealed in an investigation that approximately 150 former Guantanamo detainees who were released to new countries other than their own, are living in a legal impasse, what threatens to deport them at any moment, prevents them from working and reuniting with their families, and some of them have been subjected to detention again.

The investigation was conducted based on data collected by the human rights organization Reprieve, which helps former detainees rebuild their lives after their release from prison.

One of them is Ravil Mingazov, a Tatar Muslim from Russia was held in Guantanamo for 14 years and then the Obama administration transferred him to the UAE after his release, and he was afraid to return to his country and face possible torture, according to the investigation.

His son Youssef, who lives in London, said: “I am not saying that Guantanamo is a good place, it is one of the worst places in the world. However, compared to my father’s situation in the UAE, it is a beautiful place,” he told the Guardian.

In turn, Judicial Advisor Mohammed bin Saqr Al-Zaabi said in a statement to Al-Estiklal: “If the goal of establishing Guantanamo was to uncover criminals involved in real terrorist operations, the US prisons would have been sufficient to achieve this goal, and through public trials held in public, so that people could hear the argument and the counter argument.”

“As for placing the detainees in an isolated place that can only be reached with great difficulty, there are no guarantees available to a prisoner in American prisons, the goal here is clear, which is to practice psychological and physical torture on detainees without the slightest oversight from any neutral party that can defend the rights of these detainees as human beings,” he pointed out.

“The human rights reports over the past twenty years, as well as the testimonies of former detainees, have revealed the extent of the violations and harm that the American authorities have committed against these detainees without any guilt other than the arrogance of the warden, and to justify their tampering throughout those years with the lives of innocent people inside and outside prisons, whether in Afghanistan or Iraq,” al-Zaabi stressed.

In this regard, Robert McCaw, Government Affairs Department Director at the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), said: “Prison highlights anti-Muslim bias of US government policies in the post-9/11 era.”

“This black hole is designed to house Muslim men only, most of those held inside were not charged directly, but only on suspicion of supporting terrorism,” McCaw added in a statement to Al-Jazeera on January 10.

“The existence of such a prison to detain Muslims indefinitely and deny them their rights is a clear testimony to the different treatment that Muslim suspects have in the US judicial system,” McCaw said.