By Rosa Miriam Elizalde on July 14, 2023
2017- international conference calls for the closing of Guantanamo, photo: Bill Hackwell
For the first time in 22 years, a United Nations independent rapporteur was granted permission by authorities to visit the prison maintained by the United States at Guantanamo Bay Naval Base, Cuba. The UN official, Fionnuala Ní Aoláin, an Irish law professor, came to the same conclusion as prisoners and lawyers who have been able to offer testimony from the inside: “The suffering of the detainees is profound and ongoing,” she said in her report released last week.
Of the 780 who have passed through Guantanamo since the “global war on terror” waged by George W. Bush, 30 prisoners of various nationalities remain, survivors of torture, including waterboarding, sleep deprivation, sexual harassment, force-feeding of hunger strikers and a long record of physical abuse. Some were also tortured at CIA “black sites” before they landed in this limbo designed to circumvent the justice system and delineated for cruelty and savagery only comparable to those carried out by the Nazis in concentration camps.
The prisoners arrived in orange uniforms and hooded, and entered a detention camp made up of open-air cages, which would later be replaced by cells surrounded by three-meter electrified wire fences. With the euphemism that the detainees are “unlawful enemy combatants” instead of “prisoners of war”, the United States invented this place on Earth where suspects are not protected by the habeas corpus and judicial control of the constitutional system, nor by the Geneva Conventions for prisoners of war that apply in all civilized countries. A war, by the way, that has been over for a long time.
The Military Base, an enclave illegally occupied by the United States in Cuban territory since 1904, is an aberration that has led to hell for the elderly people with senile dementia, teenagers, seriously psychiatric patients and schoolteachers or peasants with no links to the terrorists who attacked the Twin Towers in New York on September 11, 2001. According to secret reports, leaked by Wikileaks years ago and which to this day have not been disproved, the main purpose of the prison was never to punish terrorists, but to “exploit” the denunciation of the inmates and to function as a huge police station with no limit to their stay.
“Cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment, according to international law, is constant,” says the UN rapporteur who spent four days with some prisoners, whose maintenance costs the U.S. taxpayer 13 million dollars a year, per prisoner. Most of them have never been charged with any crime. Ní Aoláin also found that detainees who had been tortured suffered extreme physical and psychological trauma that was not being adequately treated or cared for at Guantánamo.
Six administrations have maintained this horror, in some cases reneging on an election promise to close the prison. “Guantánamo,” said candidate Barack Obama in the distant 2008, “is the most serious threat to America’s credibility as a human rights-defending democracy. Biden was then a jovial U.S. vice presidential hopeful and nodded enthusiastically, adjusting his sunglasses. As soon as the two crossed the threshold of the White House, “they backed down after encountering opposition from Republicans and some Democratic lawmakers,” wrote The New York Times. And those, in theory, were the good old days!
The monstrosity that is the Guantanamo prison, maintained for so long and so far without any UN oversight, shows that it is not about a few bad apples, nor Bush’s paranoid delusion. It is the system that encourages vices and then pretends to punish them. It is the crown jewel and the Bermuda Triangle of the U.S. Government’s offshore system of injustice, embedded in this world as firmly as the Department of Homeland Security that kicks immigrants, the National Security Agency that watches over billions of citizens and the Global War on Terror (call it what you will now).
Source: Juventud Rebelde, translation Resumen Latinoamericano – English