United States President Barack Obama has a year left to complete a promise he made on the first day of his first term in office: To close the detention facility in Guantanamo Bay. And for the past seven years, he has failed to achieve that goal. Special advisers on Guantanamo Bay have come and gone — the gulag remains open.
Alarmingly, Republican lawmakers in Washington over those past seven years have fought the measure, and a majority are now of the opinion that the camp, with its military tribunals, acknowledged mistreatment of detainees — most of whom have been held for 13 years without charge — and force-feeding regimens, should remain open. They believe that the camp, with its special offshore and independent status, where normal legal rights and processes simply don’t apply, could be a useful facility to maintain for dark and nefarious activities. Besides, with around 120 detainees still incarcerated in the prison and most from Yemen, Pakistan and Afghanistan, where would they go?
This gulag is a blight on America’s human rights record; it amounts to state-sanctioned torture through physical confinement and mental anguish by holding prisoners of war without trial and without any end to their ordeal. Indeed, when German troops were taken prisoner by the Soviets at the fall of Stalingrad in 1943, the last were returned to West Germany from Siberia in 1951. That was eight years. For those in Guantanamo, it’s 13 years and counting. And for Obama, it’s seven years and counting.
