Ten Years of Guantanamo: Beyond America

During his campaign, Barack Obama promised to close the prison at Guantanamo Bay. Why has the U.S. president broken his promise?

The history of the Guantanamo prison is a chain of false assumptions and decisions that are understandable only from the [context of the] particular situation but in retrospect seem nonsensical. It is also the story of a propaganda war and an example of how judgments can vary depending on the perspective that one takes. From the point of view of most Germans, the prison camp embodies a big injustice, a disgrace for America. In the United States, on the other hand, a majority thinks that it’s good that Obama was not able to live up to his promise to close Guantanamo a year after assuming office.

At the beginning, there still was, even in Europe, a certain level of understanding. The terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, using hijacked planes to attack New York and Washington, had been planned by al-Qaida in Afghanistan under the shelter of the Taliban regime. Not only America was caught unawares by the attack. In Europe, too, citizens and politicians feared that there was a danger of further attacks. For the first time in its history, NATO invoked the principle of [collective] defense. The United Nations sanctioned the war to topple the Taliban. Additionally, the U.S. wanted to arrest suspects who might know about further plots and to interrogate them in a safe place. That’s how on Jan. 11, 2002, the first detainees (suspected al-Qaida members) from the war in Afghanistan arrived in Guantanamo. Over the years, their total number rose to 779, though never all at once. Then U.S. President George W. Bush had chosen the military base in Cuba because, supposedly, U.S. law does not apply there. His intention was to deprive the detainees of any rights.

After the routine interrogations, which to some degree involved the use of physical force, the Bush administration surely must have realized that most of the inmates were not terrorists. However, it did not acknowledge that fact in public. First, the administration still regarded itself to be at war against terrorists who wanted to kill as many Americans and their allies as possible. Second, U.S. bar associations and civil rights groups filed lawsuits against the administration because of the camp’s legal construction, the prison conditions and the code of procedure for the proposed military tribunals. The administration lost about half of these lawsuits and was gradually forced to give the detainees more rights. Publicly, Bush called the detainees “the most dangerous of the dangerous” and accused those who criticized Guantanamo of being too soft on America’s enemies. Concurrently in 2008, he ordered the deportation of around 540 detainees to their respective home countries or other countries, because he thought they were not dangerous.

In 2008, Barack Obama was elected president. On his first day in office, he ordered the closure of Guantanamo within one year. He had three goals: first, to bring an end to the lawlessness. The fates of the remaining 240 inmates were reexamined one by one. Those who were just small fry were released. Second, high-level terrorists who had masterminded 9/11 were supposed to stand trial in America. However, evidence that could stand up in trial had been gathered only against a portion of them. During the war in Afghanistan, civilian investigators were not allowed to secure incriminating evidence on the spot. Unavoidably, the accusations are often founded on secret intelligence, which is not usable in public. That is why Obama, too, in the same way as Bush, intended to put a third group of inmates in front of military tribunals or continue their detention without due process — as prisoners of war. Americans are of the opinion that such a treatment would be legal under international law. A lot of Germans doubt that. Obama argues that, as commander in chief, he is entitled to decide these issues himself. In order to close Guantanamo, Obama wanted to transfer the convicts and the prisoners of war to a new prison on U.S. soil. His administration found an appropriate prison in Thomson, which is located in a sparsely populated area of Obama’s home state of Illinois.

Nominally, during his first two years of office, Obama had a clear majority in Congress. But his party abandoned him — for fear of the voters. In 2009 and 2010, there had been new (attempted) attacks, including the so-called “underwear bomber” on an American flight from Amsterdam to Detroit and a car bomb in New York’s Times Square. It was by pure chance that the detonators had malfunctioned. In light of these circumstances, no congressman wanted to be portrayed as “soft on terrorism.” Forty-two of the released prisoners have gone back to battle against the U.S.

Congress refused to allocate funds for Obama’s plan to refit the replacement prison in Thomson and forbade the president from transferring Guantanamo inmates to the U.S. without Congressional permission. At the same time, however, America asked other countries to receive released prisoners. Today, there are still 171 inmates in Guantanamo. The biggest group is comprised of Yemeni citizens, who since 2009 were supposed to go back to their country but are not allowed to do so because of the civil war there. Thirty-six men are supposed to be tried in front of a military tribunal in Guantanamo, following a legal procedure that grants them more rights. Approximately 50 men are bound to remain detained without due process as prisoners of war.

Guantanamo will probably remain open for a long time. But under Obama, the conditions are not the same as they were under Bush. A camp that served as a prison to lock away people that were deprived of almost any rights has turned into a place of legal proceedings where the accused at least have the right to an attorney.