There are some words that become so tainted and associated with evil and inhumanity that just saying them out loud leaves a bad taste in your mouth. Guantanamo is one of them.
What is so special about Guantanamo ? After all, there’s been no shortage of other American ‘facilities’ where people have been held in limbo without judicial process and where torture and prisoner abuse occurred. Places like Bagram airbase in Afghanistan, the infamous Abu Ghraib prison, and hell-holes in middle-east ‘ally’ countries to which America ‘rendered’ prisoners for brutal, out-sourced, third-party torture. That’s probably still happening, although a lot less brazenly now. So why make such a fuss over Guantanamo ?
The fact is Guantanamo became an international symbol of everything that was lawless and loathsome about the Bush torture regime. A focus of infamy. It united decent people around the world in utter contempt for any administration that would sink so low. It became the lightning rod for their disgust. It helped to create a dark stain on Americas reputation that it may never be able to eradicate.
People thought that Obama got this and fully understood how symbolically crucial it was to close Guantanamo before America could even begin to rehabilitate itself and struggle back up out of the moral cesspit it had been plunged into by the Bush torture regime. Yet here we are, with all this time gone by, and the vile place where so many have been abused and treated inhumanely still stands.
Were the Guantanamo prisoners all the ‘worst of the worst’ as the Bush regime emphatically told the American public ? Nothing could be further from the truth. Just another deliberate, knowing lie like so many other lies they told. Over 90% of the people originally held there were never even Al Quaeda fighters (according to the US government). Among them were 21 children, a 13 year-old boy, and a 98 year-old man, innocents swept up by greedy Afghan bounty hunters and sold to the US military like cattle. Over 200 times FBI agents reported torture and abusive treatment at Guantanamo yet still it was allowed to go on for years.
Guantanamo is an utter abomination and disgrace to America on every possible level but sadly it has become the partisan football of unprincipled men and women who put political advantage above human suffering. Whether it stays open or closes has absolutely nothing to do with law or justice or any risk to the USA. It is entirely about party politics. These people are, and I’m referring to many American politicians here, the absolute scum of the earth in my opinion. That anyone ever listens to them or lets them get their own way is incomprehensible.
The position of both political parties on Guantanamo is shameful. The Republicans cynically block all attempts to close it simply to score points against Obama. The Democrats want to close it but even if they do there are no plans to give the illegally detained prisoners access to the due process of law and every intention to let some of them rot until they die in super-max prisons in clear violation of the 5th amendment. One bar to justice, of course, is that some prisoners suffered criminal abuse (torture) at the hands of the USA making fair trials impossible.
So the closure of Guantanamo, if it happens, will be symbolic at best. It will not put right the wrongs done. It will allow injustice to continue. But it will be a tiny step towards reclaiming lost integrity. Obama has shown a worrying failure of will in this as in some other things. Yes of course unprincipled political opponents made support for the evil of Guantanamo a rallying cry but wasn’t that exactly the kind of thing he was elected to defeat ? What did he or anyone else expect ? Of course it was going to be a fight but it was one that had to be won.
Obama promised to end the war in Afghanistan by 2014 but that didn’t happen, with plans now to keep troops there beyond the end of his Presidency. He also pledged to close Guantanamo and it seems he’s about to have one last try with new plans expected to be released soon. The Republicans will oppose him, of course, and Obama will then have to decide whether to use the executive powers that have always been available to him to carry out the closure or to hand Guantanamo, like Afghanistan, over to his successor as a toxic legacy.
Let’s hope that, one way or another, Obama manages to find the courage of his convictions and keeps his promise. The closure of Guantanamo would be symbolic at best but it would send a positive and necessary signal to the world. A statement of intent and an acknowledgement of the need for change.
If it is allowed to remain open, though, it will send a signal of a very different kind that says America is content to remain an internationally lawless, rogue state and nothing has fundamentally changed from the Bush era.
(cartoon by Carlos Latuff)
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