My friend Andy Worthington gives us the details of the abrupt release of three prisoners from GTMO, bringing the total number of Muslim men and boys held at our military’s great experiment in made-up-justice-to-cover-up-torture down to 27. It’s been quite a while since any prisoners were released, as Andy notes, the second longest period in GTMO history without a release. That may be about to change when Donald Trump returns to the White House.
Frankly, despite my longstanding interest in the subject, it’s been a long time since I did an interview, or frankly, much of anything. For personal reasons (largely involving the health of members of Familia TD), I haven’t been writing much about anything, or otherwise participating in matters GTMO. Plus, quite frankly, the state of the world, such as the plurality of the American electorate’s recent voluntary mass suicide (or more accurately murder-suicide) is kind of disturbing. But here we are.
So I’ll use this opportunity to wax rhapsodic about GTMO and why I have found it uniquely fascinating and disturbing for all of these years (in just a few weeks, it will have been open for an inconceivable 23 years). GTMO seemed to matter a lot for a relatively short time pretty early in the history of the facility (that would be the Bush/Cheney Administration that first thought up the idea of a lawless interrogation/torture/detention center on the uniquely Schrodinger’s sovereign American territory of the Guantanamo Bay US naval reservation that’s Cuba… but it isn’t Cuba). During the run up to the 2004 and especially the 2008 elections, there was a pretty impressive public outpouring of sympathy with the several hundred Muslim men and boys held there, most of them turned over to the U.S. military for no reason other than that they were Muslim men and boys who happened to be unpopular with the people who turned them in for cash bounties, frequently but not always in Afghanistan or Pakistan. Meanwhile, the empire decided that it was very useful for our military (which for a decade after September 11th, could not “get” Osama bin Laden despite a multi-trillion dollar global “war on terror” anywhere and everywhere on Earth) to at least have a few human war trophies around. It was also critically necessary to create the cover of ersatz “justice” to paper over the torture of certain individuals in American custody (and of course, JUSTICE FOR THE FAMILIES!). Nonetheless, albeit often for political reasons involving allies in the “war on terror,” Team Dubya managed to release around 600 of the nearly 800 men who cycled through there (although a few men did manage to leave the base dead). For his part, despite his day one executive order to close the place, the GTMO detention center was very much open throughout the entirety of Barack Obama’s Administration, and indeed, despite a welcome period of releasing men, at the end of the day, of the approximately 200 men Obama inherited at GTMO, he handed Donald Trump just over 40.
Trump, being a populist, a moron and an asshole, promised not only not to close GTMO, but to keep it open indefinitely. Whether stated or not, this seems to be a bipartisan policy, as now two Republican Presidents and two Democratic Presidents have managed to keep the place open. In his first four year term, Trump released a grand total of one prisoner from GTMO. This left the Biden Administration with 40 prisoners, including Saeed Bakouche, transferred in 2023 from GTMO to his home country of Algeria. I had followed Saeed’s case for many years as my friend Candace Gorman (my interview with Candace is here) was his attorney. In Algeria, Saeed faced immediate unjust imprisonment based on a completely fabricated file entry apparently inserted by the American military claiming him to be associated with terrorists, which of course, was entirely inconsistent with releasing him. Biden ended up releasing a total of 13 prisoner so far, around 1/3 of the total it inherited. However, the Biden Administration fucked up both opportunities it had to put GTMO finally to rest by allowing the fucking Democrats to throw a monkey wrench into a mass transer of cleared prisoners to Oman “because post-October 7th optics” and by blocking a plea deal for the bullshit “military commissions” that would have locked in life sentences to be served at GTMO for the alleged 9-11 plotters– exactly the same deal that Trump blocked when negotiated by my law school classmate Harvey Rishikoff.
A really fascinating thing is actually not that all of this is going on, but that maybe only a few hundred (or a few thousand at most) Americans are even still aware that GTMO is still open and are still pissed off about it. We can thank eight years of [my college classmate] Barack Obama and his bullshit promises that he would close it (which created the impression that he actually did close it). As a lawyer and a history/politics buff and as someone who experienced September 11th from a front row seat, the whole thing has fascinated me from the get-go. Perhaps this is because of how unnecessary it is, was and will be as long as it is open. Individuals captured in an armed conflict can already be held more or less indefinitely as prisoners of war; indeed, those believed to have engaged in terrorism or war crimes could even be tried in civilian or military courts under existing law. And in the case of the “war on terror,” pretty large scale detention camps were set up in Afghanistan (at Bagram and Kandahar just to name two that were often way stations for those who ended up at GTMO). Perhaps I am fascinated by how stupid the whole thing is from a “legal” sense: the government should not be “defending” its “right” to torture and for indefinite detention outside of any other legal structure. But here we are– and this “defense” has been seamlessly bipartisan; any of the four Presidents who have “managed” GTMO could have ended it, if they really wanted to.
So here we are. What is really going on? I submit to you that Guantanamo ain’t just a ̶r̶i̶v̶e̶r̶ ̶i̶n̶ ̶E̶g̶y̶p̶t̶ bay in Cuba. The aftermath of September 11th was an extremely useful excuse to change paradigms, and once and for all, alter even the perception that the United States was some kind of “free country.” In conjunction with a suite of technologies made available as a result of the internet age, the same security and intelligence agencies that were widely [and rightly] blamed for the failures that led directly to the September 11th events were revitalized and reconstituted in various ways (“innovations” included the creation of the Department of Homeland Security and the Director of National Intelligence). There were, of course, massive increases in budgets of the Defense Department and the “intelligence community” agencies to “fight the global war on terror,” and of course, to spy on every aspect of our lives (often with the help of such useful technological developments as “social media” and the “smart phone,” serving as rocket fuel for Silicon Valley and Wall Street, and resulting in tech behemoths that, by market capitalization, are the largest business enterprises in the history of the universe.) As September 11th fades from memory over the years (and the rationale for GTMO with it), the surveillance state just gets more robust with each passing year, as do the technical means of maintaining control over us (as if employment at will and permanently precarious “health insurance” aren’t already doing the heavy lifting of suppression).
But at its core lies the simplicity of human cruelty: the cruelty was so excessive that the [largely still classified] Senate Report on CIA torture (i.e., not even talking about torture conducted by the military itself) is over 6,700 pages with over 38,000 footnotes. Aside from the cruelty of indefinite detention itself, just off the top of my head, employees of the United States engaged in waterboarding, placing a man in a coffin sized box and threatening to put stinging insects in it, “stress positions,” forced standing, “rectal feedings,” perpetual light and prevention of sleep, “slaps,” and of course, threats of death (of both the detainee and relatives). Of course, all of this bullshit fell under the rubric of the “unitary executive theory,” or the royal theory of the Presidency which was widely believed to be extant long before the Supreme Court formally rendered Donald Trump above the law. The figures most associated with the expansion of the unitary executive theory into the realm of allowing the President to order torture were “torture memos” author John Yoo, and his White House friends, counsel to the vice president David Addington and Addington’s boss Dick Cheney himself. I will just say that issues GTMO and torture have been litigated now for over 20 years and counting, and that it is not without irony (and my absolute disgust) that the Democrats decided to rehabilitate Mr. Cheney for purposes of trotting out his endorsement of Kamala Harris, and Vice President Harris’s choice to campaign with his daughter Liz Cheney. Waterboarding under the bridge, I guess.
So here we are. In a way, GTMO is almost a perfect metaphor for where America is right now (hint: nowhere good.) The Democrats could have locked in Congressional majorities and the White House for decades had they not gone out of their way to strip a $15 minimum wage out of an omnibus budget bill early in Biden’s presidency. Senate parliamentarian my ass: THAT ISN’T EVEN A REAL THING (it’s an employee of Congress who answers to the majority leader who can fire them with a pen stroke… IF THEY WANTED TO; the Senate IS ITS OWN BOSS, FFS). Thus, to this day the federal minimum wage remains at $7.25 per hour. I won’t even talk about failing to expand access to health care (let alone Medicare for all or a “public option”), or managing to screw up student loan relief, or giving us a massive program that alleviated childhood poverty… for perhaps two years! The final insult was obviously inflation in essential goods and services (especially food). Had the minimum wage gone up… well, you heard me about Dems winning.
Of course, at GTMO, as I noted above, Team Biden had the opportunity to transfer the majority of prisoners to Oman, and permit the remaining men subject to military commissions (and “the families”) to the certainty of life imprisonment and guilty pleas. Instead, we will get none of the above. We will get Donald Trump and his cavalcade of craven incompetence and governance by and for the billionaires, as both American misery and Guantanamo remain open, in force, and unabated.
So here we are. So… three men, or 10% of GTMO’s population, get to be sent somewhere else, anywhere else, and whatever happens to them will at least not be at GTMO (as noted, they will then fall under the auspices of another nation, and we can expect the USA to wash its hands of them if those countries fail to keep their promises of humane treatment). Right now, 27 men remain at America’s Caribbean shiny detention center on a hill (I have no idea if it’s on a hill), where they can expect “uncertainty” and pointless yet vicious cruelty for the rest of their days. Just as the 346 million of us in the USA can expect much the same thing from our incoming “government.” Somehow, the men at GTMO have held on, largely because of their unabiding religious faith in which they are united. Meanwhile in America writ large, I doubt we’ll be so lucky: we aren’t united in anything, let alone religious faith, divisions exploited by those who wish us ill and want to destroy us (who now seem to constitute the majority of the electorate).
Like the men still hanging on at GTMO, all I can say is that we should try to focus on what is critically important to us, and realize that we have little control over many if not most events that take place in our lives. Maybe a few more men will get to taste freedom (or at least taste something that isn’t GTMO) before Biden leaves office and Trump locks down transfers (again). I have no idea what’s in the works. Similarly, I have no idea what is coming from our incoming malevolent government, other than likely penury and plague and probable mass death (especially if the anti-vaxx psychopath nominated for HHS Secretary is confirmed). And yet, even under what I anticipate to be horrors, we can maintain our composure and dignity and still try to be worthy people.
It’s the [miserable] lesson I take from GTMO. It’s the best I have. Not for nothing I’m writing this on the darkest day of the year. Hey, things are quite literally going to lighten up. Keep the faith.
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