After Eight Years, Guantanamo Allows Little Hope

One year ago, as George W. Bush prepared to leave office, there were
high hopes that Barack Obama would move swiftly to undo his ruinous
legacy of torture, "extraordinary rendition" and indefinite detention
without charge or trial. The most potent icon of the Bush
administration's overreaction to the terrorist attacks of September 11,
2001 was the "War on Terror" prison in the US naval base at Guantanamo
Bay, Cuba, which opened on January 11, 2002.

The new president started well, freezing the much-criticized Military Commission trial system on his first day in office, and issuing executive orders
on Day 2, upholding the absolute ban on torture, ordering the humane
treatment of wartime prisoners in interrogation, and promising that
Guantanamo would be closed within a year.

After this bold start, however, the program slipped, first into inertia,
as an interagency Task Force, established to review the prisoners'
cases, found that information about the prisoners was scattered
throughout numerous departments and agencies. Instead of drawing on evidence
that the men had largely been rounded up by the US military's allies in
Afghanistan, at a time when bounty payments were widespread, the
administration began to fear releasing prisoners who might resort to
terrorism after their release (perhaps because they had been
radicalized by their treatment under George W. Bush).

Senior officials also appeared to ignore court rulings dealing with the prisoners' habeas corpus petitions, even though, in 4 out of every 5 cases examined, judges found that the government's supposed evidence consisted mainly of confessions made under torture or duress, or allegations made by other prisoners, who were either unreliable or had been bribed or coerced into doing so.

After the inertia came cowardly backtracking. In April, when Republican uproar followed the court-ordered release of Justice Department memos purporting to redefine torture, so that it could be used by the CIA, and another court order to release photos of the abuse of prisoners
in Afghanistan and Iraq, Obama stopped the release of the photos and
quashed plans to bring some innocent Guantanamo prisoners to live in
the United States.

These men were the Uighurs,
Muslims from China's Xinjiang province, seized by mistake, who could
not be repatriated because of fears that the Chinese government would
torture them.

By capitulating to pressure, and putting pragmatism before
principles, Obama showed Republicans that he would cave in if pushed
hard enough, and his opponents - and some cowardly members of his own
party - responded by passing legislation
preventing any prisoner cleared for release by the Bush administration,
by the courts (following successful habeas petitions) or by Obama's
Task Force from being resettled in the United States.

Obama's capitulation, and his inability to control Congress, also made it extremely difficult to find new homes for the dozens of other cleared prisoners,
from countries including Algeria, Egypt, Libya, Syria, Tunisia and
Uzbekistan, who, like the Uighurs, could not be repatriated because of
fears that they would be abused on their return.

America's allies in Europe were asked to accept these prisoners, and to refrain from pointing out that the US was doing nothing to clean up its own mess, with the result that, by the end of the year, only nine men had been given new homes in Europe.

As Obama's principled stand eroded, he also dismayed lawyers, progressives and human rights activists by reintroducing the Military Commissions and stating that, according to legislation passed by Congress in the wake of the 9/11 attacks (the Authorization for Use of Military Force), he was entitled to hold dozens of other men indefinitely, without charge or trial.

As critics noted accurately, the result was a three-tier system
that made a mockery of justice. Essentially, if a conviction could be
guaranteed, prisoners would be put forward for federal court trials, as
happened in November
with Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four other men accused of involvement
in the 9/11 attacks. However, if the evidence was weaker, they would
face trials by Military Commission, and if it was weaker still or
unusable - alarmingly, because it had been obtained through torture,
which is unreliable, as well as inadmissible in either federal courts
or the Military Commissions - the men in question would be held
indefinitely.

As the anniversary approached, and the administration announced that 116 prisoners had been cleared for release by the Task Force, the repatriation of six Yemenis
offered the slim hope that one of the major obstacles to the closure of
Guantanamo was finally being addressed. Yemenis comprise 86 of the remaining 198 prisoners,
but long-standing fears about the Yemeni government's ability to
monitor released prisoners meant that, of the 561 prisoners released
between May 2002 and November 2009, only 16 were Yemenis.

However, in the wake of the failed plane bombing on Christmas Day,
and exaggerated claims that the would-be bomber, Umar Farouk
Abdulmutallab, had connections with Saudi prisoners released from
Guantanamo in a terrorist group in Yemen, Barack Obama once more capitulated to hysterical fearmongering, announcing that no more prisoners would be returned to Yemen in the foreseeable future.

This not only cast a dark cloud over Monday's anniversary, dashing
hopes that the prison's closure will take place any time soon; it also,
again, involved a refusal by Obama to fight back against lies and
distortions, by holding firm to two important points that were easily
ignored in the media's blizzard of fear.

Firstly, there was no reason to suppose that the cleared Yemenis,
held for eight years, had any connection to a recently established
terrorist group in their homeland whose ranks appeared to peppered with
Saudis, and secondly, the handful of Saudis released from Guantanamo,
who had apparently become involved in terrorism, were released not by
Barack Obama, but by George W. Bush, despite warnings from the US
intelligence services that they posed a threat to the United States.