Guantanamo prison’s future

When President-elect Joseph Biden takes over power next month, he would inherit a number of domestic and international problems, left over by his predecessor. Would he remember the Guantanamo Bay detention camp amid all that is trending in the world?

In his own country, the coronavirus is causing widespread devastation; more than quarter of a million people have already lost their lives, partly because of mismanagement of the whole situation by the previous regime. The brutal murder of George Floyd is still fresh in the minds of people, and this is not going to go away. Black Lives Matter has made it quite clear that the issue of racial discrimination in the United States remains at the top of the agenda. The new president will face rising unemployment chaos which is currently 6.7 per cent.

Before he gets down to tackle the above problems, Biden will soon be petitioned, emailed, and lobbied by human rights organisations and individual campaigners for closing the notorious detention centre, which was established in 2001 by George W Bush administration at Guantanamo Bay naval base in Cuba to lock up terrorism suspects.

It must be remembered that most suspects were not captured on the battlefield, and the US forces arrested no more than five per cent of the Guantanamo detainees. Instead, US officials dropped leaflets over Afghanistan and also in Pakistan, offering sizeable bounties for al-Qaeda fighters, the ones who were once regarded by the US as Mujahideen when they fought against the Soviet Union.

Many people fell for it and grabbed this rare financial inducement and sold them for bounties to the United States. Former secretary of state Donald Rumsfeld, during the Bush era, invented a ridiculous phrase “enemy combatants” for those suspects and deprived them of proving their innocence in the US courts. Instead, they were kept away on a foreign land in Cuba—a place outside the law—raising the possibility that many of the detainees were innocent and unlawfully imprisoned. The whole project is costing the American tax payers millions of dollars a week.

During the past four years, the world media had been captivated by the antics of Trump and forgotten or ignored the existence of Guantanamo, a location where the victims of torture, never charged or tried, are still awaiting justice and longing for freedom from their small cages to rejoin their families.

Abdul Latif Nasser, detainee 244, was promised his freedom by one administration and then the next one decided to keep him locked up forever. The 40 prisoners who remain at Guantanamo are ageing and their health is increasingly deteriorating, making them particularly vulnerable to the virus. For example, Saifullah Paracha is 72 years old, has had two heart attacks, and suffers from coronary artery disease. There are numerous other such episodes.

Ex-president Barack Obama promised to shut down this place of confinement before he won the election. He is said to have tried, though not vigorously, in his first term of office but failed in the face of Congress’s objection and did not fulfil his promise.

Biden was vice-president under Obama, therefore, he knows all about it. Now he will have full power. He can restore the tarnished reputation of his country by doing the right thing and close down this mega prison and go down in history as a decent, thinking, president.

This high-cost prison is an indefinite detention centre, a symbol of injustice, which has gained global notoriety for abuse and lawlessness where illegally held prisoners are denied the basic necessities. The United States must respect human rights and international law.

The writer is a London-based journalist

Email: n-shah@sky.com