Following up on Trump's proclamation in his State of the Union, Address President Donald Trump signed an executive order to keep Guantanamo Bay military prison open. He is fulfilling his campaign promise, in which he announced keeping the prison open and filling it up with ‘bad dudes.’
BBC News reported the following:
“A White House statement confirmed the order had been signed to resist the detention facility's closure, and affirmed the administration's right to detain enemy combatants when necessary. 'Terrorists are not merely criminals. They are unlawful enemy combatants. And when captured overseas, they should be treated like the terrorists they are,' Mr. Trump said during Tuesday's speech.”
His decision is a reversal of predecessor Barack Obama's policies to close the facility as soon as possible, even though this policy was not realized due to the inability to transfer the remaining 41 prisoners anywhere else. “The first detainees were sent there in January 2002, and more than 700 have been held there since - many without charge or criminal trial.” The site has been reported to engage in acts of torture involving tactics such as sleep deprivation, waterboarding, slamming the prisoners into walls, temperature manipulation, and locking them into coffin-like boxes.
According to The New York Times:
“Those subjected to the tactics included victims of mistaken identity or flimsy evidence that the United States later disavowed. Others were foot soldiers for the Taliban or Al Qaeda who were later deemed to pose little threat. Some were hardened terrorists, including those accused of plotting the Sept. 11 attacks or the 2000 bombing of the American destroyer Cole. In several cases, their mental status has complicated the nation’s long effort to bring them to justice.”
The issue is not only that prisoners often are detained on little to no evidence, and have no formal charges pressed against them, but also that it essentially makes future prosecution or prosecution based on information obtained from the torture impossible as it would not stand in any legal court. Additionally, the success in extracting accurate and useful information, or confession from these tactics, is highly questionable. In fact, the Senate's own report on the CIA's detention and interrogation program definitively states that torture does not work.
As stated in an article for The Guardian,
“The report finds that CIA detainees subjected to what were then called 'enhanced interrogation techniques' either produced no intelligence, or they 'fabricated information, resulting in faulty intelligence.' It says that the CIA’s own interrogators 'assessed that the most effective method for acquiring intelligence from detainees, including from detainees the CIA considered to be the most 'high-value,' was to confront the detainees with information already acquired by the intelligence community.'”
This decision by President Trump is yet another knee-jerk decision that completely disregards both the law and logic, running after a costly, illegal and completely immoral detainment and torture center that has unequivocally proven to be useless, in terms of accurate intelligence gathering that often detains individuals with no legal basis and sometimes even entirely by mistake.
According to an article for CBC World News, “Many detainees locked up in Guantanamo Bay were innocent men swept up by U.S. forces unable to distinguish enemies from noncombatants.”
Thus, given this very definitive evidence that there is no logical reason to keep the torture center open, why sign this order to do exactly that?
