At a current demonstration outdoors the White Home calling for the closure of the US navy jail on the Guantánamo Bay naval base on the island of Cuba, an adolescent approached a colleague to ask what the protest was all about. He advised her he had by no means heard of the detention facility.
It has been 20 years and 4 presidential administrations since Guantánamo opened, however for these born since then, its terrifying tales sound extra just like the plot of a fictitious horror movie than actuality. It’s a disgraceful legacy we merely can’t cross on to future generations.
Opened in response to the September 11 assaults, Guantánamo has held nearly 780 Muslim males and boys. Earlier than they had been detained, many had been kidnapped, disappeared and brutally tortured in secret US-run prisons or by so-called allies within the “warfare on terror”. In Guantánamo, they had been tortured, only a few had been charged with crimes, and none given a good trial. Kafkaesque navy commissions set as much as strive them have confirmed ineffectual and unfair, denying defendants an neutral arbiter and entry to essential proof. In the meantime, households of 9/11 victims have waited in useless for justice.
Amnesty Worldwide and lots of others around the globe have doggedly campaigned to shut the jail since its inception. President Joe Biden, like President Barack Obama earlier than him, has promised to shut it, however to date has failed to take action.
The Biden administration transferred one detainee out of the ability in July however has but to reestablish the particular envoy workplace within the Division of State devoted to the jail’s closure. Quite the opposite, the administration has lately introduced plans to construct a brand new courtroom at Guantánamo to proceed the work by the navy commissions – the very reverse of a blueprint to close the place down.
It isn’t nearly closing Guantánamo. It’s also about delivering accountability for the violations dedicated inside its setting. Final 12 months, testimonies from quite a lot of former detainees, together with Majid Khan, Abu Zubayda, and Mohamedou Ould Slahi, describing their abuse at US-operated “black websites” overseas and in Guantanamo, had been made public. Abu Zubaydah’s story was advised in a PBS documentary referred to as, the Eternally Prisoner, the torture inflicted upon Slahi, who’s now a bestselling creator and human rights defender, was portrayed within the movie, The Mauritanian, whereas Khan advised a sentencing jury about enduring stress positions, beatings, forced-feeding utilizing tubes tipped with sizzling sauce, and sodomy with a backyard hose.
The European Courtroom of Human Rights has dominated in civil instances in opposition to Italy, Lithuania, Macedonia, Poland and Romania for his or her complicity within the torture and enforced disappearance of individuals within the context of the US rendition and secret detention programmes, however there has by no means been any significant accountability for the US. From those that authorised torture on the highest ranges of the federal government to those that carried out the unlawful “enhanced interrogation strategies”, nobody has ever been held chargeable for the crimes dedicated. This could start with the declassification and full launch of the US Senate Choose Committee on Intelligence’s report on CIA torture.
Thirty-nine males stay in Guantánamo. 13 are nonetheless beneath indefinite detention, regardless of having been accepted for switch out – some greater than a decade in the past. Twelve face costs within the navy commissions, whereas the opposite 14 live in a hellish limbo: not but cleared for a switch, but by no means charged with against the law. Their plight is a relic of the overriding rules which have prevailed at Guantánamo since its inception – cruelty and arbitrariness.
The US authorities should take swift motion to proper this unsuitable. It should decide to the decision of every detainee’s case by their switch and launch with out additional delay and in accordance with worldwide regulation. Or if there may be adequate admissible proof to prosecute internationally recognisable felony offences, this have to be finished by honest judicial decision earlier than a usually constituted federal court docket with out recourse to the demise penalty.
Guantánamo stays an indelible stain on US historical past, a chapter the US authorities should now shut and by no means repeat. President Biden owes it to all of us – those that have skilled or watched Guantánamo with horror over time, and new and future generations simply now studying about it – to close it down as soon as and for all.
The views expressed on this article are the creator’s personal and don’t essentially replicate Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.