Sunday, September 09, 2012

Eleven years after 9/11, Guantanamo is a political prison...

Eleven years since the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, the majority of the remaining 168 men in Guantánamo are held not because they constitute an active threat to the United States, but because of inertia, political opportunism, and an institutional desire to hide evidence of torture by U.S. forces, sanctioned at the highest levels of government. That they are still held, mostly without charge or trial, is a disgrace that continues to eat away at any notion that the United States believes in justice.

It seems like an eternity since there was the briefest of hopes that George W. Bush’s “war on terror” prison at Guantánamo would be shut down. That was in January 2009, but although Barack Obama issued an executive order promising to close Guantánamo within a year, he soon reneged on that promise. He failed to stand up to Republican critics who seized on the fear of terrorism to attack him and he failed to stand up to members of his own party who were fearful of the power of black propaganda regarding Guantánamo and the alleged but unsubstantiated dangerousness of its inmates.

The president himself also became fearful when, in January 2010, the Guantánamo Review Task Force, which he himself had appointed and which consisted of career officials and lawyers from government departments and the intelligence agencies, issued its report (PDF) based on an analysis of the cases of the 240 prisoners inherited from George W. Bush. The Task Force recommended that, of the 240 men held when Obama came to power, only 36 could be prosecuted. Forty-eight others were regarded as being too dangerous to be released, even though insufficient evidence existed to put them on trial. Full story...

Related posts:
  1. ''Obama had no balls to close Gitmo''
  2. Obama's Change: Killing without trial, spying without warrant...
  3. US doctors turned 'blind eye' to Guantanamo torture...
  4. 6 years of solitary confinement and torture for a teen at Guantanamo...
  5. Confessions of a Guantanamo guard...
  6. Bradley Manning's inhumane treatment continues ...
  7. A 48-year-old Afghan citizen dies at Guantanamo after 9 years in a cage and...

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