Ten years ago 20 shackled captives disembarked from a C-141 just arrived from Afghanistan, shuffled blindly along a short tarmac and entered “the least worst place.”That’s what then U.S. defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld called the prison that had been hastily constructed at the century-old U.S. naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
It was never meant to be permanent. Even its creator, president George W. Bush said in August 2007: “It should be a goal of the nation to shut down Guantanamo.”
Protests organized by human rights groups have been held throughout the U.S., Britain, Canada and elsewhere this week. More are planned for Wednesday’s anniversary, including one outside the U.S. consulate in Toronto.
The message: “Close Guantanamo now.”
But that won’t happen. Not anytime soon.
On New Year’s Eve, President Barack Obama signed a fiscal law known as the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which forbids the U.S. administration from using money to build a new prison or to bring detainees to the U.S., even to face trial. In other words, it makes it impossible to shut Gitmo this year.
During the past 10 years, nearly 800 “enemy combatants” have been held on the base, about the size of Manhattan. The youngest was 12, the oldest 89. There are 171 remaining, including Canadian Omar Khadr, one of only six captives tried so far.
Khadr entered a plea deal in October 2010 in which he admitted to five war crimes and was sentenced to eight years. A diplomatic agreement meant he could be sent home for the remainder of his sentence after one year, according to the plea.
That hasn’t happened, despite Washington’s eagerness to rid itself of the 25-year-old Toronto-born war criminal. A Pentagon official told me a couple months ago: “We’d drop him off at the border if we could.”
But nothing happens quickly at Guantanamo, and Ottawa, which distinguished itself as the only Western government to not request the return of a citizen, is in no hurry to have Khadr back.
Among the issues were whether Defence Secretary Leon Panetta had to “certify” Canada as “fit” to receive a convicted terrorist and whether Ottawa could ensure Khadr would not pose a future danger to the U.S. (a Congressional restriction that makes it difficult to transfer detainees to third countries for refuge).
This week an Obama administration official with knowledge of the case told the Star that the passing of the NDAA means Khadr’s guilty plea exempts his case from this certification.
But it will likely be at least a month before the transfer takes place. “Internal U.S. processing” is how the official explained the delay: “Gitmo is so odd. There’s no systematic way to do things.”
“Gitmo is so odd” — that phrase alone could explain many Guantanamo stories that have emerged in the past decade.
It’s a difficult place to describe — a tropical patch with a gift shop that sells “It don’t GTMO better than this” T-shirts just a short drive from the cell holding self-professed 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (“KSM”). Not that we know where that cell actually is, since “Camp 7” is not part of the media prison tour. But nowhere in Gitmo is far away, even with the strict 25 mile-per-hour speed limit.
Obama understood the importance of Guantanamo’s symbolism when, just two days after his inauguration in January 2009, he decreed he would shut the prison within a year.
He did not promise to banish indefinite detentions or Guantanamo’s military commissions — which civil rights groups continue to condemn — but he wanted to erase that enduring image of those first orange-clad detainees kneeling in the Cuban sun while dogs barked and soldiers yelled.
Critics blame Obama for failing to make closing the prison a priority after that first week in office. After that, Congress blocked any future efforts.
While Obama has failed to close Gitmo, his administration continues to rail against it.
“The prison at Guantanamo Bay undermines our national security, and our nation will be more secure the day when that prison is finally and responsibly closed,” Obama’s Homeland Security and Counterterrorism assistant, John O. Brennan, said in September at Harvard’s Law School.
But don’t expect Guantanamo to be an important 2012 election issue. Neither Democrats nor Republicans stand to gain much from the debate, and polls indicate most Americans don’t care deeply about its presence anyway.
It’s a fear of releasing the wrong man that keeps Gitmo open rather than the fear of imprisoning an innocent one. More than 80 of the current 171 detainees have been cleared by the Pentagon for release, but they have no place to go. So they remain in their island limbo.
But even if Gitmo is not an important domestic issue, it still colours America’s reputation abroad, especially in the Arab world, itself unexpectedly reshaped by the Arab Spring with its widespread demands for freedom and democracy.
Expect this to come into focus when KSM and his four alleged 9/11 co-conspirators go before Guantanamo’s newly vamped military commission this spring, in what is arguably the most important terrorism trial of the decade.
Civil rights groups say Guantanamo’s system is still flawed. The Obama administration says the legal inadequacies of the former administration’s military commissions have been corrected.
The legal arguments will continue, as will debate in Gitmo’s court of public opinion.
And for the time being, “the least worst place” will remain open.
Original Article
Source: Star
No comments:
Post a Comment