There is a view that prison has become America’s cage
The Execution of Guantanamo: A Threat to the Future of the American Prisoner’s Reputation and the Rule of Law
A note from the professor and executive director of the Human Rights Institute at Georgetown University Law Center, who is also a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress. The views in this commentary are her own. Read more opinion at CNN.
Former Director of National Intelligence Admiral Dennis Blair called Guantanamo “a rallying cry for terrorist recruitment and harmful to our national security.” Former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates told President Bush that Guantanamo was a “national security liability” and advised him to close it down.
George W. Bush, who was President at the time, said he wanted to shut down the prison before he left office. Henry Kissinger was Secretary of State and he decried the damage that Gitmo did to our national reputation.
The working group that was formed by the Center for Ethics and the Rule of Law included two ex-heads of the military commission and one of its chief prosecutors who condemned the continued operation of the prison.
And the costs of being stuck there are enormous: loss of US moral authority, particularly acute now amid the global contest between democracy and authoritarianism; free propaganda for America’s enemies; lack of closure and accountability for the worst terrorist attacks in US history. It costs the American taxpayers $540 million a year to maintain the prison. The improvised detention and trial experiment at what Donald Rumsfeld glibly called “the least worst” place to warehouse prisoners in the war on terror has been a moral, legal, strategic, and financial sinkhole for our country.
We often talk about who we are as a nation, but who we are cannot be separated from what we do. During a recent meeting about how to hold Russia accountable for crimes in Ukraine, prosecutors from the war crimes division said they had studied American mistakes such as torture and had tried to avoid them. This is how the legacy of Guantanamo will be remembered. It’s fitting that the president who brought the war to an end should be the one to expunge the legacy, since Biden is the only one who can restore America’s reputation for justice and rule of law. The question is not why or if, but how.
At this point, closing the prison is a risk management exercise, and the risk is clearly manageable. We can finally leave the prison with leadership and persistence from the president.
The US Senate Foreign Relations Committee said the CNN report – which revealed a swathe of clandestine detention centers used by the Iranian regime to brutalize protesters into submission – demonstrated that Iran was prepared to torture its own people in order to quell unrest.
In November, the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC) launched an independent investigation into Iran’s crackdown on a nationwide uprising that erupted in September over the death in detention of 22-year-old Kurdish-Iranian woman Mahsa Amini. Evidence of abuse will be collected by the mission.
The findings of a probe by a UNHRC-established commission of inquiry on Syria were used last year in the prosecution of a Syrian ex-colonel in Germany for crimes against humanity.
Drawing on about two dozen testimonies from Iranian lawyers and survivors of the black sites, CNN found that the use of the black sites – which exist outside of Iranian due process – was unprecedented in scale.
Among the most severe forms of torture detailed in those testimonies were electrocutions, removal of nails, lashings and beatings that resulted in scars and broken limbs, and sexual violence.
The findings show that the regime meting out torture on an industrial scale was trying to crush the uprising that posed the biggest threat to the elite in decades.
