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Petition urges Biden to close Guantanamo military prison

By MAY ZHOU in Houston | China Daily | Updated: 2022-02-11 07:27
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File photo: The United States flag flies inside of Joint Task Force Guantanamo Camp VI at the US naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, March 22, 2016. [Photo/Agencies]

More than 30,000 people have signed a petition asking United States President Joe Biden to shut down the Guantanamo Bay detention camp created in 2002 during former president George W. Bush's administration.

The petition, calling Guantanamo a "human rights disaster", was started by the American Civil Liberties Union.

"For 20 years, the US military prison at Guantanamo Bay has been a stain on our country. Today, 39 Muslim men remain indefinitely detained there at the astronomical cost of $540 million per year," it says.

The prison, which is inside the US' Guantanamo Bay Naval Base on the southernmost coast of Cuba, was created following the 9/11 attacks on the US. It has been used to indefinitely hold terrorism suspects, some of whom await trial. The Cuban government has said the base is illegal.

Since January 2002, around 779 Muslim men and boys have been held at Guantanamo. Most have been held without charges or trials, and many were tortured, according to media reports and a senior member of the Bush administration.

About 540 were released during the Bush administration, another 200 or so were released during the Obama administration, and one was released during the Trump administration. Nine have died at the camp, the ACLU says.

Of the 39 men still in detention, 12 have been charged with war crimes. Of those, two have been convicted and 10 are waiting to be tried. Eight detainees are held in law-of-war detention, while another 19 are held in law-of-war detention but have been recommended for transfer to another country when security conditions are met, according to the Guantanamo docket, The New York Times reported.

Under international law of war, it is legal to detain enemy combatants without charge in order to remove combatants from the battlefield.

US authorities have recommended Mohammed al-Qahtani for transfer to Saudi Arabia, most recently on Feb 4. Suspected of being al-Qaida's intended 20th hijacker for the 9/11 attacks, he was among the first detainees sent to Guantanamo. Al-Qahtani has been detained for almost 20 years.

The torture of al-Qahtani and other detainees was widely reported during the early years of the operation. Various media outlets have reported that al-Qahtani was subjected to prolonged isolation, sleep deprivation, sexual humiliation and other abuses.

The Bush administration had repeatedly denied torture until Susan Crawford, a senior member of the administration, admitted for the first time in 2009 that torture had been carried out at Guantanamo.

"We tortured Qahtani. His treatment met the legal definition of torture," Crawford told The Washington Post in 2009.

The US government was criticized and condemned by human rights groups. The United Nations tried unsuccessfully to shut down the detention center.

The Bush administration made the decision to use Guantanamo Bay Naval Base as a detention camp because it believed the prison, being on foreign soil, would not be subject to the jurisdiction of US courts.

Since 2004, however, in more than one ruling, the US Supreme Court has said that US courts did have jurisdiction and that the prisoners were entitled to minimal protection under the Geneva Conventions.

The Bush administration asserted that detainees weren't entitled to those protections, which ensure humanitarian treatment of war combatants, saying the detainees were "unlawful combatants" or "enemy combatants" rather than war combatants.

Since the prison's inception, various human and civil rights groups have brought lawsuits against the US government for holding the detainees without trial or charges and for allegedly torturing them.

Facing criticism both domestically and internationally, then US president Barack Obama had planned to close the detention center. However, in 2015, the US Senate passed a bill on a 91-3 vote explicitly prohibiting the Obama administration from transferring Guantanamo Bay detainees to the United States.

In 2018, then president Donald Trump signed an executive order to keep Guantanamo open indefinitely.

Hina Shamsi, director of the ACLU National Security Project, writing on the 20th anniversary of the opening of the detention camp, called Guantanamo "a symbol of racial and religious injustice, abuse and disregard for the rule of law".

 

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