Guantanamo prison remains open despite growing pressure on Biden to close it down

By Leila Nezirevic

LONDON (AA) - The Guantanamo Bay prison in Cuba has become an embodiment of cruel detention practices that have caused the US to be accused of torture.

The US military detention facility, opened by then-President George W. Bush to hold terrorism suspects captured abroad after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, is still operating as a remnant of the so-called war on terror.

Earlier this year, around 160 international rights groups sent a letter to President Joe Biden urging him to shut down the prison.

Oxfam America and the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) said the facility, also known as “Gitmo,” fuels “bigotry, stereotyping and stigma” and that by promoting social divisions, it risks enabling “additional rights violations.”

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), a non-profit organization dedicated to defending the civil liberties of all Americans, has urged Biden to close the facility down, describing it as a “global symbol of injustice, abuse and disregard for the rule of law.”

“Well, I'd be very surprised if Guantanamo is closed anytime soon because there's just not the political appetite I think in America to do that,” Clive Stafford Smith, a prominent US human rights lawyer who represented 87 Guantanamo prisoners and won 85 cases, told Anadolu.

At one point, there were nearly 800 prisoners at the facility with 749 eventually freed, said Stafford Smith.

They were all Muslim men who had been kept there for years without being charged, he added.

Mansoor Adayfi, who was sold to the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) by local warlords in Afghanistan in 2001, spent his 18th Ramadan “naked, blindfolded and chained all day in a cold, dark cell under the ground.”

In his latest testimony, he said the American agents would play loud music constantly and would only stop when “they would take me out for an interrogation. I didn’t – and couldn’t – know when Ramadan started, as I had no way to estimate the time of day.”

While he was chained up, the US soldiers every few days would forcibly feed him and push water through his mouth.

“I lost so much weight that I passed out and I was given intravenous transfusions every few days,” he said.

Several months later, he was transferred to Guantanamo Bay prison, where he said he repeatedly experienced torture, humiliation, and abuse.

He was kept there locked up for 14 years without charge.

- ‘Enduring stain’

Stafford Smith pointed out that Guantanamo Bay prison is an “enduring stain” on the reputation of the United States.

“When we as a country go around the world and say that we are proponents of human rights, the rule of law and liberties, the idea that we set up a prison, which is a vacuum of human rights and has no legal rights at all, is just hypocrisy of the first order,” he said.

“I never thought back in the 1990s that I as an American lawyer would be talking about torture methods that my government was using on a systematic basis and admitting to them publicly,” said Stafford Smith.

On just one of his clients who got out recently, he identified 62 different methods of torture which the US government refers to as “enhanced interrogation techniques,” an expression borrowed “from Nazis.”

Over the last 20 years, Stafford Smith represented more than 10% of all the Guantanamo prisoners on a charitable basis.

For him, this has been a great privilege, “because frankly, my job as an American lawyer is to try to make up for some of the dreadful things we've done.”

While representing the prisoners, he has come to realize how “incredibly stupid the whole concept of Guantanamo was, and how bad our intelligence was.”

- US government paid bounties to detain people

According to Stafford Smith, more than half of the people at Guantanamo ended up there because the American government paid bounties of between $5,000 and $20 million for information leading to the detention of individuals.

One of his clients, Mohammed El-Gharani, was sold for a bounty to the US and was unjustly imprisoned for seven years in Guantanamo at just 14 years old.

El-Gharani’s life was turned upside down when he moved to Pakistan from Saudi Arabia to study computing and English.

One day, upon leaving Friday prayers at a mosque in Karachi, he was unjustly and mistakenly arrested.

He was taken to Guantanamo, where among all other prisoners he faced repeated torture, constant acts of racism and xenophobia.

- US ‘killing’ and ‘abducting’ people

Instead of standing up for human rights, the rule of law and decency, the US is torturing people by locking them up without trial and by assassinating them with drones, said Stafford Smith.

“We can't go around the world just killing people and abducting them,” he said.

During his election campaign, former US President Barack Obama pledged to shut down Guantanamo, “and what does he do instead? He substitutes assassination. He goes around the world with drones, just murdering people,” said Stafford Smith.

Mark McDonald, a former British MP and politician, told Anadolu that the prison remains due to a mutual agreement between Republicans and Democrats not to close it down.

“You see, George Bush (a Republican) started this program. But the Democrats supported it. A lot of Democrats supported it. And so Obama coming in saying, ‘We're going to do this,’ he got stuck because Congress didn't agree,” he added.

In his opinion, President Biden has done very little to close it down, and this is down to “politics. It's always about politics.”

Guantanamo Bay is “a stain on our national identity,” said Stafford Smith, and “what we've got to do as Americans is get back on the road to behaving decently and applying the rules that we've fought for many, many years.”

McDonald, who is also a prominent barrister, argued that “the stain” on the United States is in fact “a lot of their foreign policy,” including “the thousands of civilians that died in Afghanistan.”

“Guantanamo Bay is just one of them,” he said.