{"id":38606,"date":"2025-01-24T17:15:00","date_gmt":"2025-01-24T17:15:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/?p=38606"},"modified":"2025-01-25T06:59:33","modified_gmt":"2025-01-25T06:59:33","slug":"trump-inherits-the-guantanamo-prison-complete-with-4-forever-prisoners","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/trump-inherits-the-guantanamo-prison-complete-with-4-forever-prisoners\/","title":{"rendered":"Trump inherits the Guant\u00e1namo prison, complete with 4 \u2018forever prisoners\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Lisa Hajjar<\/a>, University of California, Santa Barbara<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

President Joe Biden\u2019s record of handling the U.S. military prison at Guant\u00e1namo Bay, Cuba, is decidedly mixed. He succeeded in reducing the detainee population he inherited by more than half, but he compounded problems in the military commissions that the Bush administration had invented in the wake of the 9\/11 attacks to try people captured in the \u201cwar on terror.\u201d Now all the problems at Guant\u00e1namo are again President Donald Trump\u2019s.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When Biden took office in 2021, there were 40 prisoners. Today there are 15<\/a>, the lowest number since the first 20 Muslim men and boys<\/a> captured in Afghanistan were airlifted to the base on Jan. 11, 2002.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Biden left Trump four people the U.S. will not release but also cannot put on trial \u2013 the so-called \u201cforever prisoners<\/a>.\u201d He also left intact the troubled military commissions system<\/a>, with three pending criminal cases against a total of six detainees.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In December 2021, former chief military defense attorney Brig. Gen. John Baker testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee<\/a>: \u201cIt is too late in the process for the current military commissions to do justice for anyone. The best that can be hoped for at this point \u2026 is to bring this sordid chapter of American history to an end.\u201d Baker made clear that the only viable option is to resolve the cases with plea bargains for the defendants. https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/eqB-iec436A?wmode=transparent&start=1338 Marine Brig. Gen. John Baker tells U.S. senators that there is no opportunity for justice to be done at Guant\u00e1namo.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A chance to make progress<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

There are three cases that have not yet gone to trial \u2013 the 9\/11 case<\/a> with four defendants facing charges for their connections with the attacks, the USS Cole bombing<\/a> in October 2000 with one defendant and the Bali bombing in October 2002<\/a> with one defendant.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The 9\/11 and USS Cole cases have been stuck in the pretrial phase since Biden was Barack Obama\u2019s vice president. In the summer of 2024, a breakthrough in the 9\/11 case appeared imminent: Prosecutors and defense lawyers for three of the four defendants reportedly reached plea-bargain agreements<\/a>. Khalid Sheikh Mohammad \u2013 the alleged \u201cmastermind\u201d of the attacks \u2013 Walid bin Attash and Mustafa Hawsawi agreed to plead guilty and accept life sentences in exchange for the government taking the death penalty off the table. There was no deal for the fourth 9\/11 defendant, Ammar al-Baluchi.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The deals were approved on July 31 by the top military officer overseeing the Guant\u00e1namo commissions, retired Brig. Gen. Susan Escallier. But two days later, Biden\u2019s defense secretary, Lloyd Austin, stepped into the process and overrode Escallier \u2013 whom he had appointed. Austin announced that the plea deals were revoked<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The judge, Air Force Col. Matthew McCall, decided to schedule plea hearings for early January. But after some legal back-and-forth that forced a stay, he had to cancel them. Biden left the case against three 9\/11 defendants in limbo.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"A
The basement of this government building in Bucharest, Romania, held a secret CIA prison, one of many across the world. AP Photo<\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Witness to the transition<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

In mid-January 2025, I made my sixteenth reporting trip to Guant\u00e1namo. I came for closing arguments on a motion in the 9\/11 case that seeks to suppress statements that Ammar al-Baluchi made to the FBI in January 2007. That was four months after he and 13 others were transferred to Guant\u00e1namo from CIA black sites<\/a> where they were held for years. The litigation to suppress those statements started in 2019.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In Chapter 10 of my book, \u201cThe War in Court: Inside the Long Fight against Torture<\/a>,\u201d I detail how the litigation on this suppression motion made public previously unknown details and under-acknowledged horrors of the CIA\u2019s rendition, detention and interrogation program.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

These closing arguments were the culmination of six years of litigation on the key question in the 9\/11 case: Does torture matter<\/a> in the pursuit of justice in the military commissions?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"A
A drawing by Guant\u00e1namo detainee Abu Zubaydah depicts a person being waterboarded. Copyright Abu Zubaydah 2019. Licensed by Professor Mark Denbeaux, Seton Hall Law School<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Can Guant\u00e1namo be closed?<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Of the 780 people ever detained<\/a> at Guant\u00e1namo, 540 were released during the presidency of George W. Bush, who established the detention facility. Obama, who signed an executive order on his second day in office pledging to close Guant\u00e1namo<\/a> within a year, released 200.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In his first term, Trump pledged to keep the facility open<\/a>. The only man to leave Guant\u00e1namo during Trump\u2019s first term was Ahmed al-Darbi, who was repatriated to Saudi Arabia in 2018<\/a> to serve out the remainder of his sentence from a 2014 plea bargain agreement.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When Biden took office, he said that he supported shutting down the military prison<\/a> at Guant\u00e1namo. In the early years of his presidency, there was a slow stream of transfers<\/a>, mostly people who had been cleared for release long ago and were freed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In Biden\u2019s last months, the pace of transfers quickened. In December 2024, a Kenyan detainee<\/a>, two Malaysian members of al-Qaida<\/a> who had pled guilty the previous January, and a Tunisian<\/a> man who had been in Guant\u00e1namo since the day the facility was opened were all repatriated to their countries of origin and freed. In January 2024, 11 Yemenis were transported from the prison to Oman<\/a> to be resettled.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

15 men left behind<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

The Biden administration had also planned to repatriate a severely disabled Iraqi detainee, Abd al-Hadi al-Iraqi, to serve out his plea-bargained sentence in a Baghdad prison. But a federal judge blocked that transfer<\/a>, ruling that al-Iraqi would not get necessary medical treatment in Iraq and might be subject to abuse there.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Al-Iraqi is one of the 15 that Biden left behind. Three of them \u2013 a Libyan, a Somali and a stateless Rohingya \u2013 have long been cleared for release<\/a>. Their continuing detention without charges highlights a key element of the Guant\u00e1namo problem: No one can be released unless the U.S. government finds another country willing to accept them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

One of the remaining detainees, Ali Bahlul, is serving a life sentence<\/a> for conspiracy to commit war crimes. Six others, including the four 9\/11 defendants, are awaiting their trials.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There are also four detainees whom the government refuses to transfer but cannot put on trial for lack of evidence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"A
The U.S. goverment says it cannot release Abu Zubaydah from Guant\u00e1namo because he would disclose classified interrogation techniques critics have labeled torture. U.S. Central Command via AP<\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

These so-called \u201cforever prisoners\u201d include Abu Zubaydah, a Saudi-born man of Palestinian descent who was taken into CIA custody in 2002 and was used as the guinea pig for the CIA torture program<\/a>. The government long ago conceded that Abu Zubaydah was not a top leader of al-Qaida<\/a> \u2013 in fact he was not even a member. But he will not be released because he knows how he was treated by the CIA, and that treatment remains highly classified<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The newest forever prisoner is one of the original 9\/11 defendants, Ramzi bin al-Shibh; in September 2023, he was declared mentally incompetent to stand trial<\/a>. Now he is uncharged, unreleased and untreated for his psychological maladies that were caused by the torture<\/a> he endured in CIA black sites.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The \u2018War on Terror\u2019 is not over<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

When Biden pulled U.S. troops out of Afghanistan in August 2021, he claimed to have ended America\u2019s longest war \u2013 and repeated this claim in a January 2025 speech<\/a>. But the Guant\u00e1namo prison remains open, and as long as it is, the \u201cwar on terror,\u201d which first put U.S. troops in Afghanistan in 2001, is not over.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

How Trump will deal with Guant\u00e1namo is an open question. If he focuses on the death penalty<\/a>, he will press ahead with military commission trials like his predecessors, hoping for unanimous guilty verdicts and death sentences. If he prioritizes cutting wasteful government spending, he will release additional detainees and allow the three plea bargain agreements to go into effect.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

No one I spoke to during my last trip was willing to predict what a second Trump term might bode for Guant\u00e1namo \u2013 except that it won\u2019t be closed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Lisa Hajjar<\/a>, Professor of Sociology, University of California, Santa Barbara<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

This article is republished from The Conversation<\/a> under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Lisa Hajjar, University of California, Santa Barbara President Joe Biden\u2019s record of handling the U.S. military prison at Guant\u00e1namo Bay, Cuba, is decidedly mixed. He succeeded in reducing the detainee population he inherited by more than half, but he compounded problems in the military commissions that the Bush administration had invented in the wake of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":56,"featured_media":38607,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[817,46,295,47,4],"tags":[2443,15963,710,15965,479,15964,7046,885,891,886,860,10371],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38606"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/56"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=38606"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38606\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":38609,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38606\/revisions\/38609"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/38607"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=38606"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=38606"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=38606"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}