The Periodic Review Board system was set up during the Obama administration to determine whether detainees being held there were guilty or not. One detainee who was already cleared for release during the Obama administration was released to his home country of Morocco in July. This was the first transfer of a detainee under Biden.
Aside from the 10 already eligible for release, 17 detainees are eligible for periodic review board hearings, two detainees have been convicted and ten are in the office of military commission process, meaning they are still in the pretrial process in the military court system created for law of war offenses, and they have yet to be proven guilty or innocent.
Read More. Pretrial hearings in the office of military commission's most high-profile case against five detainees alleged to have been involved in the plotting and execution of the September 11 terrorist attacks, resumed last week. The case itself has already been through nine years of pretrial litigation, and a start date for the trial still appears far off, according to lawyers involved in the case. Even were one to believe that the Guantanamo detainees have been correctly deemed enemy combatants, there's no good reason to keep them in Cuba.
At present, we have more than two million prisoners in U. It is obvious we could have easily incarcerated a few hundred more on U. So why the choice of Guantanamo? Guantanamo was attractive as a place of detention for one reason alone: it was thought to be a legal black hole. More specifically, because of a series of court rulings in the s involving Haitian and Cuban refugees, Guantanamo was believed to be beyond the reach of the Constitution and the courts.
The Supreme Court's decision in Rasul v. Bush , which held that the courts had habeas corpus jurisdiction over Guantanamo, changed this picture dramatically. Detainees got access to counsel, and information about Guantanamo began to reach the public. The impact of Rasul has been put into question, however, by the jurisdiction-stripping provisions of the Detainee Treatment Act of and the Military Commissions Act of Whether the courts will continue to monitor abuses at Guantanamo may hinge on a constitutional challenge.
Detainees at Guantanamo have been subject to arbitrary detention. The combatant status review tribunals that are supposed to assess whether the detainees are enemy combatants base their decisions on secret evidence that the detainees have no opportunity to confront.
The decision-making process is quick, efficient, and nearly worthless in terms of reaching a reliable result. Moreover, the U. As of June 19, , when Hamid Karzai was elected to the presidency of Afghanistan, the international armed conflict in that country was at an end.
Detainees from that conflict should either be tried for war crimes or other criminal offenses, if there's evidence against them, or they should be returned to Afghanistan. With arbitrary detention, has come physical abuse.
The President said in his February 7, , Executive Order that the detainees at Guantanamo should be treated in accordance with the Geneva Conventions, "to the extent appropriate and consistent with military necessity. Ex-detainees have reported beatings and cruel treatment, but it may be that the worst abuses at Guantanamo were endured by a prisoner who remains detained.
Muhammed al-Qahtani, a Saudi citizen who is alleged to have been implicated in the September 11 plot, was physically and mentally mistreated from mid-November to early January For six weeks, he was intentionally deprived of sleep, put into painful stress positions, forced to stand for long periods, and subject to sexual and other physical humiliation.
He was refused trips to a latrine, so that he urinated on himself at least twice. He was also threatened with forced enemas, and on one occasion was subjected to one. Human Rights Watch has obtained an unredacted copy of al-Qahtani's interrogation log, and believes that the techniques used during al-Qahtani's interrogation were so abusive that they amounted to torture.
Weakening the Counterterrorism Effort and Undermining U. Leadership on Human Rights. Why Guantanamo Bay is still open Story highlights Jonathan Russell: Return to Guantanamo Bay and torture policies might sound tough But doing so without deradicalization of jihadists will put us in jeopardy, he says.
Some will undoubtedly use this news to make the argument that Guantanamo Bay should remain open, that it should be increasingly used to house the current crop of jihadist terrorists and that no further inmates should be released.
Indeed, President Donald Trump has made some of these arguments , and Republicans have put pressure on him to expand the prison in Cuba. No one is more outraged than me, a counter-extremism specialist, by the reports that a former Guantanamo prisoner joined ISIS and carried out this attack. But keeping the prison and expanding it would not be in the best interests of US or European security.
While military prisons were designed to prevent deaths in war and to speed up the conclusion of conflict, it is clearer now than ever that they do not adequately address the global jihadist insurgency we have faced over the last 15 years. Read More. After Harith was suspected of having links to al Qaeda and the Taliban in , he was taken into American military custody and shipped off to Guantanamo Bay without trial. Such extrajudicial methods came at the expense of the rule of law and the traditional criminal justice system to prosecute Harith for terrorism-related offenses.
It means he was never proven to be a terrorist.
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