The Guantanamo Bay detention centre has been in and out of the news for at least two decades now. The case of a 73-year-old Pakistan prisoner, Saifullah Paracha, has once again hit the limelight as the oldest Guantanamo prisoner is likely to be released in the next few months. His notification of release has been approved after nearly 17 years of detention at the US base in Cuba. Paracha was held on suspicion of having ties with Al-Qaeda but no crime could be presented to charge him for over one and a half decade. At the time of the arrest, he was in his mid-fifties and since then has spent the rest of his life behind bars. The fact that the prisoner review board cleared him and two other men says a lot about the injustice meted out to prisoners just on suspicion of crimes that most of them never committed.
The worst part of this drama is that while clearing the prisoners, the notification does not provide any detailed reasoning for the decision or even of the causes for his detention for that long. The American justice system – or lack thereof – wants us to accept the sole explanation given that ‘Paracha is not a continuing threat to the US’. It is not yet clear when the authorities will release him but at least some progress is visible in that direction.
We have been hearing from as far back as President Obama’s tenure in office that the notorious detention centre at Guantanamo Bay would be closed down for good. President Trump halted any progress in this matter; now the Biden Administration is hinting that it intends to resume efforts to close the centre. It is imperative that the closure of the centre is finally carried out and this process must not halt under any circumstances. Since its opening in January 2002, this prison has witnessed countless miscarriages of justice and the use of torture techniques not in common practice in today’s civilized world. The US has tried to shield its atrocities at Guantanamo by using an excuse of some obscure law of war which allows the capturing party to hold detainees indefinitely without charge. Guantanamo Bay and Bagram became a symbol of how the ‘war on terror’ turned the US into an outlaw state, with the cry of terrorism enough for it to embrace police-state tactics and war crimes against Muslims. That stain can only be cleansed with a reckoning of the magnitude of the crimes committed.
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