Guantanamo prison needs to be closed
A little more than 10 years ago, Dick Cheney, then the vice president, seemed to suggest the inmates at the American prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, should not so much endure their experience as enjoy it, like a sun-soaked holiday at some upscale resort.
“They got a brand new facility at Guantanamo,” Cheney remarked. “We spent a lot of money to build it. They’re very well treated there. They’re living in the tropics. They’re well fed. They’ve got everything they could possibly want.”
Oh boy! Where can we make reservations?
The reality is this is a “vacation” most of us would be loathe signing up for. Built in 2002 by the George W. Bush administration to house prisoners from the conflict in Afghanistan, along with an assortment of other terrorism suspects, it has become a symbol to the wider world of torture and human-rights violations. Dozens of prisoners have been held at Guantanamo Bay for years on end, without charges being brought and with no prospect for release. While some of them are certainly worthy of their imprisonment, some might have simply been in the wrong place at the wrong time. Keeping them in shackles indefinitely stands in sharp opposition to key American principles criminal suspects have a presumption of innocence and a right to due process. When we lecture the rest of the world about the virtues of democracy and human rights, countries like China, Egypt and Russia could point to Guantanamo and question our seriousness and credibility.
Three years ago, President Obama said, “Imagine a future – 10 years from now, or 20 years from now – when the United States of America is still holding people who have been charged with no crime on a piece of land that is not part of our country … Is that who we are? Is that something that our founders foresaw? Is that the America we want to leave to our children?”
No, and last week the president presented a plan to Congress that would shut down the prison before his term ends next January. While it’s a step forward, it’s a step that doesn’t go far enough.
It calls for bringing 30 to 60 of the 90 or so Guantanamo detainees to prisons in the United States, and sending the remainder to prisons elsewhere in the world. While it keeps many of the detainees in limbo, closing the facility would at least save taxpayers $445 million per year, and would carry considerable symbolic weight.
It goes without saying Republicans in Congress immediately scoffed at the plan, as they reflexively would even if Obama presented a resolution proclaiming chocolate cake is delectable and sunny days are preferable to cloudy ones. And GOP presidential candidates have lately been trying to outdo one another in the tough-guy sweepstakes on the campaign trail, with Donald Trump promising more torture, and Florida Sen. Marco Rubio vowing Guantanamo would stay open on his watch, suspects would be shipped there, “and we are going to find out everything they know.”
But even some of Obama’s Democratic allies have developed weak knees, with Sen. Michael Bennet of Colorado asking none be transferred to his state. That’s ridiculous, considering a federal supermax prison in Colorado already houses the likes of Terry Nichols, an accomplice in the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, and “underwear bomber” Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, who tried to blow up a plane as it was coming in to land at Detroit in 2009. If these facilities are secure enough to contain characters as notorious and unsavory as these, why would Guantanamo detainees pose a greater danger?
That Guantanamo remains open and its inmates remain in an unending limbo has come to symbolize more than just an unfortunate chapter in our history. It epitomizes all that is dysfunctional about our politics.