Gitmo Limbo

“Gitmo Is Killing Me.” With this title, at the end of last month, The New York Times published an article dictated by a prisoner to his lawyer over the telephone in its opinion section. He is one of the 166 prisoners accused of terrorism who remain at the Guantánamo detention camp in Cuba, known to Americans as “Gitmo.”

The prisoner, Fahled Hussein Sahel Hentif, is a man in his 30s who was detained in Afghanistan at the end of 2001 and sent to Guantánamo. Much like hundreds of his fellow prisoners, he has been on a hunger strike for months. He says that he does not want to commit suicide, but nevertheless he is force-fed by staff, which also administers sedatives to keep him calm. A significant factor for this could be that upon arriving at the Cuban prison, he weighed some 78 kilograms; now he weighs approximately 38.

When President Obama was elected in 2008, he promised to close the detention center within a year. Five years later, in Obama’s second term, the prison remains open and operational, although it no longer uses the methods of torture that earned it its unwanted fame during George W. Bush’s presidency.

Gitmo is managed by the U.S. military; the detainees — so-called “enemy combatants” — have not been given a trial, nor do they have any defined legal status. They are in a sort of legal limbo. In any other Western country, the detention center would be illegal. As commander in chief, Obama could, and perhaps would like to, close it down, but his Republican adversaries firmly oppose. Last week, after being interrupted during a speech about the prison, the president took a merely pacific tone. “These are tough issues. And the suggestion that we can gloss over them is wrong.”