20 Years of Shame
The Guantanamo Bay detention camp, a symbol of post-9/11 abuses, remains open and it's unclear if Biden has a plan to close it.
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No, your mind isn’t playing tricks on you: Guantanamo Bay prison made news this week as the Senate Judiciary Committee held its first hearing on closing the highly controversial detention facility in eight years.
This development about the forever prison, located in Cuba, comes as it approaches its 20th year in operation as the world’s most infamous post-9/11 detention center. Currently, 39 detainees remain marooned on the island prison, which has held 780 prisoners since Jan. 11, 2002—the far majority of whom were never charged with a crime. (According to Human Rights Watch, only 16 Guantanamo detainees were ever charged with a crime.)
While the failed war in Afghanistan was the subject of renewed scrutiny following the Taliban’s return to power during the summer, Guantanamo remains largely out of view of the American public.
As is the case in Washington, the hearing is unlikely to produce any tangible results, especially since the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA)—the country’s massive and hugely consequential defense bill—was already passed by the House of Representatives.
But we did get a sense of one thing this week: The Biden administration seemingly has no concrete plan to close the infamous, torture-stained, and legally dubious complex that is GITMO—confirmed by the White House’s absence from the proceedings.
For what it’s worth, Biden has indicated a desire to close the prison, but he has shied away from the type of public pronouncements made by his former boss, President Barack Obama, who famously failed to deliver on his promise to shutter the prison. Even President George W. Bush, whose administration opened it and adopted a torture regime, had similarly endorsed GITMO’s closing. Those efforts, however, stalled under President Donald Trump, who signed an executive order ensuring that the prison would remain open.
New leadership doesn’t guarantee change, as we all know. The administration’s stated position is that closing Guantanamo is “certainly our goal and our intention,” according to White House press secretary Jen Psaki. While Biden did resist pressure from war mongers to leave troops in Afghanistan amid the Taliban takeover, there’s little indication he’s willing to exert political will to close a prison that continues to scar America’s reputation, whatever that’s worth.
So, why do we bring this up?
Well, as long-time listeners will recall, we released an episode about Guantanamo a few years ago documenting the history of the prison and its abuses. We thought it was such an important issue to cover that we traveled to Washington, D.C. for a protest, which occurs annually outside the White House.
Critically, the episode features the perspective of Mark Fallon, a former Department of Defense official who was part of the task force charged with investigating terrorists for possible military commissions after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks.
Fallon described a process by which the United States would pay bounties for alleged terrorists and imprison them indefinitely at Guantanamo.
“Most of the people who ended up at Gitmo were picked up by the Northern Alliance or other groups that didn’t necessarily have any interest in the global war on terror, aside from picking up a $5,000 per head bounty,” Fallon writes in his book “Unjustifiable Means: The Inside Story of How the CIA, Pentagon and U.S. Government Conspired to Torture.”
The detainees taken to Guantanamo from bounties represented an astonishing 86 percent of all those who eventually ended up at the prison, according to Reprieve, an international human rights group. American planes flew over Afghanistan and Pakistan dropping leaflets offering thousands of U.S. dollars for “suspicious” persons, which the Center for Constitutional Rights notes “was a huge amount of money in both countries.”
“We’d ended up with a bunch of guys warlords had turned in for a bounty with no evidence they had any value,” Fallon wrote in his book. “We called them dirt farmers—lots and lots of dirt farmers.”
The most high-profile detainee at GITMO, accused Sept. 11, 2001 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, was arrested in 2003 but has yet to face a military commission.
Guantanamo is effectively a legal black hole—and there’s no telling when the U.S. government will at the very least end its legacy of torture, indefinite detention and horrific abuses, once and for all.
Coming off our episode about capitalism’s destruction of Afghanistan, we thought it was important to revisit this episode since Guantanamo remains very much active, no matter how much officials would like for it to disappear from our collective consciousness.
How to Listen to ‘America's Black Hole: Indefinite Detention, Torture & Terror at Guantanamo Bay’
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Here’s a short video from the protest we produced in conjunction with the podcast:
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News Beat is a multi-award-winning podcast brought to you by Morey Creative Studios and Manny Faces Media.
Audio Editor/Sound Designer/Producer/Host: Manny Faces
Editor-In-Chief/Producer: Christopher Twarowski
Managing Editor/Producer: Rashed Mian
Episode Art: Jeff Main
Executive Producer: Jed Morey