As Guantánamo’s 14th Year of Operations Begins, This Must Be the Year It Closes

Must be signed in and friends with that member to view that page.

Shaker Aamer’s First Phone Call from ... Gitmo Clock Marks 600 Days Since Pres...

As Guantánamo’s 14th Year of Operations Begins, This Must Be the Year It Closes

As the prison at Guantánamo Bay begins its 14th year of operations, I am in the US for a short tour calling for the prison’s closure — and, specifically, in Washington D.C. for a protest outside the White House on the actual anniversary of the prison’s opening — January 11.

With 28 men freed in the last year, and just 127 men still held, there are reasons for cautious optimism that the end is now in sight for the prison, a reviled symbol of the Bush administration’s post-9/11 overreach and disdain for the law, and of President Obama’s difficulty in placing principles above political expediency.

Two good reviews of where we stand on Guantánamo’s 13th anniversary were published last week in the New York Times. In the first, “The Path to Closing Guantánamo,” Cliff Sloan, who has just resigned as the State Department’s envoy for closing Guantánamo (a role he has held since 2013), praised the progress made in the last 18 months — with 39 prisoners released, compared to four in the previous two years, when Congressional obstruction was at its most potent, and President Obama’s political will at its weakest.

In addition, as Cliff Sloan noted, “We also worked with Congress to remove unnecessary obstacles to foreign transfers,” and “began an administrative process to review the status of detainees not yet approved for transfer or formally charged with crimes” — the Periodic Review Boards, which have, to date, reviewed the cases of nine prisoners not already approved for release by a task force President Obama established in 2009, and recommended six for release.

As Cliff Sloan also noted, 59 of the 127 men still held have been “approved for transfer,” and as he proceeded to explain:

This means that six agencies — the Departments of Defense, Homeland Security, Justice and State, as well as the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the director of national intelligence — have unanimously approved the person for release based on everything known about the individual and the risk he presents. For most of those approved, this rigorous decision was made half a decade ago. Almost 90 percent of those approved are from Yemen, where the security situation is perilous. They are not “the worst of the worst,” but rather people with the worst luck. (We recently resettled several Yemenis in other countries, the first time any Yemeni had been transferred from Guantánamo in more than four years.)

Looking to the future, Cliff Sloan also noted that, although there has been “great progress” towards closing Guantánamo, it “will take intense and sustained action to finish the job.” As he explained, “The government must continue and accelerate the transfers of those approved for release. Administrative review of those not approved for transfer must be expedited.” Crucially, he added, “The absolute and irrational ban on transfers to the United States for any purpose, including detention and prosecution, must be changed as the population is reduced to a small core of detainees who cannot safely be transferred overseas.”

As Cliff Sloan also explained:

The reasons for closing Guantánamo are more compelling than ever. As a high-ranking security official from one of our staunchest allies on counterterrorism (not from Europe) once told me, “The greatest single action the United States can take to fight terrorism is to close Guantánamo.” I have seen firsthand the way in which Guantánamo frays and damages vitally important security relationships with countries around the world. The eye-popping cost — around $3 million per detainee last year, compared with roughly $75,000 at a “supermax” prison in the United States — drains vital resources.

Cliff Sloan’s op-ed ended with an important statement: “Imprisoning men without charges for this long — many of whom have been approved for transfer for almost half the period of their incarceration — is not in line with the country we aspire to be,” which is certainly the opinion of all Americans who respect the rule of law above the fearmongering that has eaten away at the country’s values since 9/11.

In another New York Times article last week, “Obama Nears Goal for Guantánamo With Faster Pace of Releases,” Helene Cooper looked in further detail at what might happen in the months to come. Firstly, she noted, the Pentagon is “ready to release two more groups of prisoners in the next two weeks,” although officials “will not provide a specific number.”

She added that President Obama’s goal, before leaving office, is “to deplete the Guantánamo prison to the point where it houses 60 to 80 people and keeping it open no longer makes economic sense.”

Officials explained that the president expects that Ashton B. Carter, nominated to be the next defense secretary, will “move more aggressively on emptying Guantánamo” than Chuck Hagel, whose caution evidently frustrated the White House, and ultimately led to his resignation. Carter’s colleagues told the Times that he is attuned to President Obama’s “desire to be part of the last chapter of the Guantánamo prison.”

Officials also told the Times that they “hope to keep up the current pace,” although they acknowledged that, “after the planned two groups of transfers, the releases may slow down,” because officials at the Pentagon and the State Department have to find countries prepared to take in the Yemenis approved for release, who make up 52 of the 59 men approved for release, in the absence of any confidence that the security situation in Yemen is sufficiently secure to allow any prisoners to be repatriated.

Ian Moss, the State Department’s spokesman for Guantánamo issues, said, “I can tell you that in the world of Gitmo transfers and our conversations with foreign governments, momentum matters.” He added, “We are aggressively reaching out to a wide variety of countries. This language was echoed by Paul Lewis, the Pentagon’s special envoy for the closure of Guantánamo, who said that “the Defense Department continues to aggressively pursue the transfer” of low-level prisoners who have been declared eligible for release. He added, “we take our obligation to assess the potential threat of detainees seriously prior to transfers,” but he also stated that in 2015 there could be “an increase of detainees eligible to transfer” — presumably through the Periodic Review Board process.

All decent people can only hope that, as 2015 — and the 14th year of Guantánamo’s operations — unfolds, the 59 men approved for release — including Shaker Aamer, the last British resident and the focus of my most recent campaign, We Stand With Shaker — will be freed, and serious efforts made to approve others for release through the Periodic Review Boards (because few of the 68 others genuinely pose any kind of threat, and only ten are facing trials), and to persuade Congress that the remaining prisoners must be transferred to the US mainland so that Guantánamo can be closed for good.

This is because, as I never tire of saying (although I look forward to the day I no longer have to say it), the prison at Guantánamo is a legal, moral and ethical abomination, and every day it remains open — with its arbitrary system of indefinite detention, its prisoners cleared for release but still held, its brutal force-feeding, and its essential nature as a prison built on torture — ought to be a source of profound shame for all decent Americans.

Some opponents of Guantánamo fear that such a move will enshrine the indefinite detention policies of Guantánamo on the mainland, but I don’t agree. I think there would be new legal challenges, and ones with real teeth, because, to be blunt, far more rights exist on the US mainland than in Guantánamo, and, although sentencing rules and prison conditions are punitive and disgraceful, there is no precedent for imprisoning people without charge or trial, as at Guantánamo, and, I believe, any effort to establish a precedent would attract fierce and, I am sure, successful opposition by lawyers and judges.

Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer and film-maker. He is the co-founder of the “Close Guantánamo” campaign, the director of “We Stand With Shaker,” calling for the immediate release from Guantánamo of Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in the prison, and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (available on DVD here — or here for the US).