Say the words September 11 to any American and their reaction will be immediate and visceral, as they recall the shock and anguish of the airborne terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. But while January 11 is not as well-known to most Americans, it should be. On January 11, 2002, the U.S. government responded to al-Qaeda’s atrocity with one of its own.
That was the day the marauding administration of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney responded to September 11 not by pursuing the perpetrators and bringing them to justice, but by opening an illegal, immoral, and unconstitutional prison camp at the U.S. military base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
Guantanamo’s specialties include kidnapping (more euphemistically known as “extraordinary rendition”), arrest without charges, imprisonment without trial, torture, and even, in several cases, murder. Guantanamo shares these distinctions with CIA black sites around the globe in countries such as Poland, Lithuania, and Thailand.
While Donald Trump was recently in the news for calling for the abolition of the Constitution, Guantanamo’s continued existence shows the extent to which we are already living in a post-constitutional era. The Eighth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States plainly forbids “cruel and unusual punishment” and the Fifth Amendment requires “due process.”
Waterboarding, one of Guantanamo’s most well-known torture methods, is cruel and unusual. Dangling people from the ceiling until their arms detach from their sockets is cruel and unusual. Depriving prisoners of sleep for days on end, locking them in confined spaces, and threatening to kill their family members is cruel and unusual. And none of it comes with due process.
All of these practices are forbidden not only by the U.S. Constitution, but also by Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions, the UN Convention Against Torture (UNCAT) and 18 U.S. Code 2340(a), the Torture Statute. And all of them have been the stock in trade at Guantanamo, carried out by the government of the United States.
At its peak, 780 Muslim men and boys, almost all Arab, were held at Guantanamo. Thirty-five of them remain. Most have never been charged with a crime, for two reasons. First, most of them simply had the misfortune of being Arab near the Afghan-Pakistan border in the fall of 2001, when the Bush-Cheney administration decided to invade Afghanistan. Bush and Cheney needed props for their political theater to help to justify the so-called “Global War on Terror.”
But there’s another reason none of these men has ever been charged with a crime in a legitimate court of law (the kangaroo military commissions at Guantanamo don’t count): they have all been tortured. On that basis alone, any court worthy of the name would have to dismiss charges and let them go.
Our Kafkaesque Caribbean hellhole has now been open for 21 years. It’s stunning to realize that for anyone in their mid-20’s or younger, Guantanamo must seem like a normal part of the American landscape, rather than the grotesque constitutional aberration that it is.
Guantanamo was opened with the rationale that it kept us safe from monsters. “These are people that would gnaw through hydraulic lines in the back of a C-17 to bring it down,” said Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The dental improbability of Myers’ remark notwithstanding, the prisoners at Guantanamo have in actuality been men like the gentle Mauritanian electrical engineer Mohammedou Ould Slahi, whose incidental contact with members of al-Qaeda brought him under suspicion, and Yemeni teenager Mansoor Adayfi, kidnapped by Afghan warlords and sold for a bounty to the U.S. while on a cultural mission to Afghanistan. These men are not monsters; those who have tormented them are.
If the U.S. government is not concerned about the moral and legal costs of Guantanamo, or the extent to which it has turned us into an international pariah, there is also the question of financial efficiency.
As Human Rights Watch has noted, as of 2019 the U.S. was spending more than $540 million per year on Guantanamo. But the expense was probably higher, it added, since there are classified costs as well. The price of illegally detaining the 35 remaining men averages out to more than $15.4 million per prisoner per year.
In his 2020 campaign for president, Joe Biden talked about restoring “the soul of our nation.” Closing Guantanamo would be a good place to start.
[Jon Krampner helps to organize the Close Guantanamo Rally for Interfaith Communities United for Justice and Peace (ICUJP). Courtesy: LA Progressive, a website founded by Dick and Sharon whose mission is to provide a platform for progressive thought, opinion and perspectives on current events.]
