Column — Biden Has Time and Authority to Finally Close Guantánamo

Democracy Now!

By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan The time has come to shutter the prison at the U.S. Naval Base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, where men are held far offshore the mainland U.S. in an extrajudicial hell. There, men imprisoned for over 20 years, without charge, without trial, and who have been cleared for release, remain caged, virtually forgotten. President Biden, thankfully, hasn’t forgotten. Eleven long-term Guantánamo prisoners were recently released, transferred to Oman to live free. Fifteen men remain imprisoned in Guantánamo. Of those 15, six have never been charged with a crime, and three have been cleared for release. Biden can deliver a measure of justice to all those remaining in Guantánamo. He should release those who’ve been cleared, and transfer those who remain charged or convicted to a facility inside the U.S. He should then order the notorious Guantánamo Bay prison to be shut down, once and for all. Overall, 780 men were imprisoned at Guantánamo since 2002, most without charge. A handful of U.S. attorneys have advocated for them, some for almost a quarter century. Ramzi Kassem, a law professor at City University of New York, is one of these lawyers. “Moath al-Alwi is a Yemeni national,” Ramzi Kassem said on the Democracy Now! news hour, describing one of his clients who was just released to Oman. “He’s one of the very first prisoners who arrived at Guantánamo. The prison was opened on January 11th, 2002. He was on the second or the third plane. You could tell by his low internment serial number, 028. He was never charged with any crime. He was, like the majority of prisoners at Guantánamo, sold for a bounty, $5,000 to $15,000, that the U.S. government was paying to tribes in the Afghanistan-Pakistan border region for so-called Arabs out of place. By the government’s own allegations, Mr. al-Alwi never so much as fired a shot at U.S. forces or their allies. Still, he spent 23 years, over half of his life, at Guantánamo.” Ramzi Kassem described another of those prisoners recently released from Guantánamo: “Sanad al-Kazimi survived the CIA black sites. He was disappeared in the United Arab Emirates, survived severe forms of physical and psychological torture at a prison that the prisoners who survived it called ‘the prison of darkness’ or ‘the dark prison.’ The CIA called it the ‘Salt Pit’ or ‘Cobalt’ in the Senate’s report about the torture that happened there. He was brought to Guantánamo in 2004. He was also never charged with a crime. He has four kids that he hasn’t seen for the better part of their lives.” Multiply these stories hundreds of times, and you begin to grasp the scale of injustice that has dominated the 20-plus year stain of Guantánamo on the U.S. justice system. Sharqawi Al Hajj is another of the Yemeni prisoners just released to Oman. He has long been represented by Pardiss Kebriaei, a senior staff attorney with the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR). “Sharqawi is 51. He’s been inside since he was captured when he was 28, 29,” Kebriaei said on Democracy Now! “Guantánamo was set up as an intelligence-gathering operation. The point of it was to establish a place offshore where people could be held outside the bounds of the law, without access to courts, incommunicado, and where they could be interrogated.” Despite years of interrogation, including two years before Guantánamo, when Sharqawi Al Hajj was imprisoned at a CIA dark site in Jordan and at Bagram Airbase in Afghanistan, which was dubbed “Gitmo East” as the brutality inflicted on prisoners there paralleled that suffered at Guantánamo itself. “The release of these people and their freedom for the first time after all of this time, the chance to reunify with their families and begin to recover and rebuild, it’s hard to overstate the enormity of that for them,” CCR attorney Pardiss Kebriaei said. It seems at best unlikely that the remaining prisoners would see anything under the incoming Trump administration other than a continuation of their lives in the legal black hole that is Guantánamo Bay. For example, Moath al-Alwi became an accomplished artist while imprisoned. Following a 2017 New York exhibit of art by him and other Guantánamo prisoners, the first Trump administration declared their artwork “government property,” telling lawyers it would be destroyed. The policy was reversed under President Biden. Perhaps, if Trump’s federal budget-cutting duo of Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy were to consider Guantánamo, it would be closed. After all, the government spends half a billion dollars a year keeping the prison and the court at Guantánamo open – now, for just these 15 men. President Barack Obama pledged to close Guantánamo as far back as 2009, but failed to do so. President Biden still has the power to close it, he has the authority, and he still has the time. But does he have the will?