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Intro:
Intro:
When people think about what America is supposed to represent and portray to the world, it is justice and freedom. Guantanamo Bay Prison is neither of those things. With a history of torture, numerous human rights violations, and hundreds of wrongful imprisonment this prison in no way represents justice or freedom. Despite this, the prison is still open today. Why? Many American citizens and even politicians have called to close it, but it has not happened. We should ask why it was allowed to be sanctioned in the first place. In what world does it seem normal for a foreign country, the USA, to lease the land for a military prison from a country that could be considered their enemy, Cuba? That's our world, that's our reality, and it is our normal, but it shouldn't be. The nefarious political maneuvering of our constitution has allowed the USA to abandon its mask of a true democracy because if this was a democracy to begin with Guantanamo Bay could have never even existed.
As one of the USA’s most heinous acts this country's government has ever committed, you would think that the Guantanamo Bay Detention Center would be heavily talked about or known, but as I discuss my topic with more and more people in my school, most of them don't even know of its existence. Much of this can be attributed to the fact that over the years, Guantanamo Bay has been talked about less and less, google shows that the trend line of the subject has been on the decline since 2009. So before getting ahead and explaining the why of Guantanamo Bay, let's explain what it is and how it came to be what it is today.
"The U.S. did not care and continued occupation under the Platt Amendment, and Cuba had and continues to have no manpower to do anything about it. "
History of Guantanamo Bay:
Guantanamo Bay detention camp is a military prison inside a US naval base located on the coast of Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. It was the events of 9/11 that made the naval base into what we know it to be today, but the USA’s history with the land started way before 2001. The Spanish-American war went from April 21-August 13th 1898, Cuba was waging this war because they wanted independence from Spain, this interested the USA partly because they felt the plight of the Cuban rebels but more importantly, because they wanted to land there. The Ostend Manifesto was a document written in 1854 detailing why the US wanted to buy Cuba from Spain. This document was written during the Franklin Pierce administration, he was a Democrat and very supportive of Southerners wanting to turn Cuba into a gigantic sugar plantation, and if Spain disagreed they would wage war. Pierce even sent diplomats to Spain to argue for this, but it turns out his fellow politicians were the ones who needed convincing because northerners vetoed any chance of going to war to make a slave state. This is to say that the US motivations behind their involvement in the war were not as pure as some would lead you to believe because they have been eyeing Cuban land for a long time. The US sent a warship USS Maine to Havana to “protect their interest,” but on February 15th, 1998, the ship mysteriously blew up, which marked the start of the war. The war ended with Spain surrendering Cuba, the Philippines, and Guam.
Cuba gained its independence from the US in 1902, and in 1903 Cuba and the U.S. signed the lease for Guantanamo Bay. This lease added the Platt Amendment to the Cuban constitution, which the U.S. agreed upon terms that Cuba had to follow. The price that the U.S. currently leases the land for is about $4,085 per month, the Platt Amendment also gave the U.S. the right to interfere in all Cuban affairs. The common assumption after all of this would be that Cuba must enjoy having the USA's protection because they have allowed them to have this much authority, but this couldn't be further from the truth. The Cuban government claimed the 1903 lease invalid and has only cashed one of the checks since the signing of the lease by accident. The U.S. did not care and continued occupation under the Platt Amendment, and Cuba had and continues to have no manpower to do anything about it.
Treatment of Prisoners:
If you have ever heard of Guantanamo before, it was probably when someone was speaking on the treatment of the prisoners there, specifically after 9/11. The September 11th, 2001 terrorist attacks turned Guantanamo Bay into a place the Bush administration would use to house “dangerous terrorists' they had caught straight from the middle east, but we will soon find out that this is not the full truth. These men were taken from their homes and thrown in a foreign prison without trial. The US government would then proceed to use “enhanced interrogation methods'' which usually included different forms of torture. Brigadier General Janis Karpinski operated Abu Ghraib and other Iraqi prisons, she revealed that the abuses that were done in the prison she ran were by soldiers trained in Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay “[D]detainees were to be treated like dogs,…The methods... included depriving detainees of sleep; leaving them in excessively cold, air-conditioned rooms; placing them in 'stress positions'; and forcing them to stand or crouch for long periods with their arms extended.” They used one prisoner named Abu Zubaydah as a lab rat to perfect these torture methods. One of the most horrifying experiences in Guantanamo was the actions taken against the hunger strikes. The Forgotten Prisoners of Guantanamo Bay details Zachary Katznelsn saying, “This peaceful protest is met with brutality. Twice a day, every day, the men are strapped down into a chair with sixteen different straps. You can't move at all. A tube is shoved up their nose, down their throats, and snaked into their stomachs. Then the soldiers begin to pour a liquid supplement down. Sometimes, the same tube is taken out of one prisoner and put right into another prisoner without being cleaned first. This is happening each day.”
If you still don’t believe that the U.S is capable of committing such tyrannical horrors, the senate intelligence agency investigated the CIA torture program and recorded a detailed report, that is 6,700 pages long, revealing many things like how their methods were unsuccessful in gaining information and that the interrogations were far more violent than they told everyone. The CIA went to great lengths to keep this information from ever coming out, destroying videotapes of their crimes and lying to the public. If their actions were democratic, just, or legal, then they would have nothing to hide and they know that. Lying and obstructing show guilt. Their public image meant a lot because what was called “enhanced interrogation methods” was just the torture of men who have not been proven guilty.
Since then, more physical torture has ended. But every day, those men are going through psychological persecution that could also count as a form of torture.
Guantanamo and the Law:
“[N]or cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.” are the words used in the 8th amendment to stop the federal government from inflicting unnecessarily harsh punishments on criminal defendants. This is the amendment that promises that prisoners are fed 3 times a day, and have clean water, a bed, and a toilet. It protects prisoners' human rights. However, even though Guantanamo Bay prisoners are in American custody, they are not protected by the 8th Amendment or any part of the Constitution besides a part of the 14th Amendment called the Habeas Corpus. Habeas Corpus protects prisoners from indefinite sentences, giving them the right to petition. This would be a big win, but the petition process in Guantanamo Bay is not the same type of process we would get. Detention and Torture in Guantanamo Bay by Rita Maran speaks on the reality of the military commission tasked with hearing and trying the prisoners “It is not a court, it is a panel of five military officers, employees of the same authority that detains and prosecutes the defendants”. This showcases how this system is made to be against the prisoners at every turn.
You would think that in the USA, where everybody is supposed to be equal under the law, human rights wouldn’t be conditional, but they are. President George W. Bush had the unfortunate fate of being president when 9/11 happened, as explained previously he housed the prisoners he obtained from the aftermath(the war on terror) in Guantanamo Bay. The reason why Guantanamo is the perfect place for them was because of the previously established lease agreement they had with Cuba, which made them able to control what happens in and on the naval base fully but lets Cuba keep ultimate sovereignty. If they kept the prisoners on American soil they would have to give them the same rights that any other American prisoners would get.
This means they get no trial and are not guaranteed protection against cruel and unusual punishment. Their status is not prisoners of war but “enemy combatants,” which means international laws do not protect them. Because of all these facts, Guantanamo Bay has been dubbed a legal black hole.
“It is not a court, it is a panel of five military officers, employees of the same authority that detains and prosecutes the defendants”.
Why is it Still Open:
It’s very easy to blame a system and leave it at that, but there are a lot of individuals that keep this thing going. Every single president since Bush has had a clear stance on Guantanamo Bay and three out of four of those presidents called for it to be closed, yet the prison is still open at the time of this writing. Bush was the man that turned the prison into what it is known as or but eventually, he called for it to be closed; however, he change his mind about this decision toward the end of his presidency, agreeing with his advisors that the prison was a sign of the countries stance against terrorism The President after that was Barack Obama who was famously against Guantanamo Bay, in 2016 he said “For many years, it has been clear that the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay does not advance our national security—it undermines it. It’s counterproductive to our fight against terrorists,” yet he did not fulfill his promise of closing it. Donald Trump completely reversed everything Obama did accomplish towards his goal, even promising to reinstate the torture program, saying that it would be “a hell of a lot worse than waterboarding” and “it wouldn't bother me even a little bit”. Current president Biden has said he wants to close the prison but has not actually done anything to make that happen, and some prisoners have claimed that conditions have worsened since he became president, he has also not implemented a better judicial system, for example replacing the military commission.
The hard thing about making something so draconian yet lawless is that it is very hard to turn it into a democratic institution. This has been one of the reasons why Guantanamo Bay has been so difficult to close, it's because now they have to find a way to transfer and release prisoners they illegally captured. Obama was against the military commission as a way to judge prisoners and promised, “Going forward, my administration will work with Congress to develop an appropriate legal regime”. But the new system, while being much more organized, is more or less the same in terms of efficiency. The combination of this and the lack of willpower by politicians due to backlash from Republicans have kept it open.
European Colonialism and Guantanamo:
In all honesty, nobody should be surprised at the prison's existence or its prisoners' treatment. The United States of America has had a long history of inhumane treatment of individuals that they even sometimes considered citizens. Slavery, attack on civil rights after slavery, treatment of Native Americans, Japanese American internment camps, and the list goes on and on. The crimes that the USA comments outside of their borders often happen to be of the greatest horrors. Before Guantanamo was a prison for suspected 9/11 terrorists it was detention camps made for blocking Cuban and Haitian refugees from entering the US. The prisoners were put in conditions that Amy Kaplan’s “Where is Guantanamo” describes as Many “makeshift barbed wire camps, exposed to heat and rain in spaces infested with rats and scorpions, with inadequate water supplies and sanitary facilities." They justify the holding of Haitians by saying that they have aids which further pushed racist agendas. So even at the site of Guantanamo Bay today, they have committed great injustices. Through all this, the USA is still pretty successful in keeping its image of being the nation that the whole world is supposed to look up to but in most regimes, there have been behaviors we expect from nations we constantly look down on.
This is not just an idea that started when the United States was started, the example of being horrible and cruel and then acting on a higher level of morality came from European colonialism. The Black Flag: Guantánamo Bay and the Space of Exception has some great commentary on this topic, “the space of normative regulation was produced by European states asserting their sovereignty over the world beyond the line and co-producing through those assertions“ is what the author Gregory Derek said. This is what has been seen throughout our history so much that it has turned into our normal. When Africa was “up for grabs” in 1885, a lot of nations like the British and the French justified killing natives and taking their land by helping them get civilized or wanting to introduce them to Christianity. This was also why Herman Cortez colonized the Aztec Empire and slaughtered all of their people. So America is not doing anything different, simply following in the footsteps of its political ancestors who claimed they killed, robbed, and raped with good reason.
"So America is not doing anything different, simply following in the footsteps of its political ancestors who claimed they killed, robbed, and raped with good reason. "
The Easy Departure from Democracy and how do we come back?:
We have subconsciously been taught in this country that it's a good thing to ignore the humanity of others when they are against you. Guantanamo Bay prisoners have been made out to be villains who don’t have nor deserve love, life, or liberty. In The Black Flag: by Dereck Henry, he also speaks on this demonization, “This invocation of an indivisible global civilization works to make the exception - understood as a zone of indistinction between the law and its suspension - invisible by conjuring a shape-shifting, nomadic enemy who inhabits the shadows beyond the human.” The truth is that these are real people who have been hurt and scarred for life. Nothing was fair about the creation of Guantanamo, and nothing is fair about how it is still operated. In a country that prides itself on being a democratic role model for the rest of the world, allowing laws like equal rights, freedom of speech, and press, it is disgraceful that Guantanamo Bay is what it is.
What should scare everybody was that this departure from democracy was easy. The CIA got the okay from the president, and that was that. What proceeded was the psychological and physical torture of 780 men. We should be scared, we shouldn't be applauding catching the bad guys, we should be asking if our government can do this, what else can they do? The question now is how do we come back or rather can we come back? This was not a mistake, it was not something that just happened, and it is not something that has ended, so until the remaining 30 men are released happens, I do not see a way to move forward.
The film My Brothers Keeper tells the story of former Guantanamo prisoner Mohamedou Ould Salahi and former Guantanamo guard Steve Wood and their unlikely friendship. They became close in the prison, drinking coffee and playing cards, and after Mohamedou was released they stayed close. “I believe in humanity,” Mohamedou says “ …That we transcended all those stereotypes, all this hatred. We didn't do that after prison. We did that in the darkest of moments. We did that when it mattered most.”. This beautiful quote highlights that we as a society and race could all come back to humanity if we all showed it and fought for it, not only in terms of Guantanamo Bay but every human rights violation in our world's future.
Sources:
Gregory, Derek. “The Black Flag: Guantánamo Bay and the Space of Exception.” Geografiska Annaler. Series B, Human Geography 88, no. 4 (2006): 405–27. http://www.jstor.org/stable/4621537.
Maran, Rita. “Detention and Torture in Guantanamo.” Social Justice 33, no. 4 (106) (2006): 151–81. http://www.jstor.org/stable/29768407.
Katznelson, Zachary. “The Forgotten Prisoners of Guantanamo Bay.” Policy Perspectives 5, no. 3 (2008): 125–32. http://www.jstor.org/stable/42909218.
Johnson, Douglas A., Alberto Mora, and Averell Schmidt. “The Strategic Costs of Torture: How ‘Enhanced Interrogation’ Hurt America.” Foreign Affairs 95, no. 5 (2016): 121–32. http://www.jstor.org/stable/43946963.
Kaplan, Amy. “Where Is Guantánamo?” American Quarterly 57, no. 3 (2005): 831–58. http://www.jstor.org/stable/40068318.
“My Brother’s Keeper: A Former Guantánamo Detainee, His Guard and Their Unlikely Friendship.” n.d. Www.youtube.com. Accessed March 24, 2023. https://youtu.be/IH-h3h22Hck.
Rasul v. Bush." Oyez. Accessed March 24, 2023. https://www.oyez.org/cases/2003/03-334.
Crook, John R. “U.S. Administration Encounters Difficulties in Effort to End Guantdnamo Bay Detentions.” The American Journal of International Law 103, no. 3 (2009): 575–79. http://www.jstor.org/stable/40283662.
The New York Times. “The Guantánamo Docket.” The New York Times, May 18, 2021. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/us/guantanamo-bay-detainees.html.
“Guantánamo Prisoner Details Torture for First Time: ‘I Thought I Was Going to Die.’” The Guardian, October 29, 2021. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/oct/29/going-die-guantanamo-prisoner-torture-testimony.
United States Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. Accessed May 15, 2023. https://www.intelligence.senate.gov/sites/default/files/publications/CRPT-113srpt288.pdf.
“Guantánamo Detainees Say Conditions Are Worse since Biden Became President.” VICE, June 16, 2021. https://www.vice.com/en/article/m7e3jq/guantanamo-detainees-say-conditions-are-worse-since-biden-became-president.
“President Obama Presents the Plan to Close Guantanamo: ‘This Is about Closing a Chapter in History.’” National Archives and Records Administration. Accessed May 14, 2023. https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/blog/2016/02/23/president-obamas-plan-close-guantanamo-about-closing-chapter-history#:~:text=More%20videos%20on%20YouTube&text=Today%2C%20President%20Obama%20announced%20the,standards%20of%20rule%20of%20law.
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