WHY is Guantanamo Bay prison still open? People throughout the world continue to ask this question. The answer is very simple. The detention facility at the US naval base in Cuba is still open because it is run by the world's sole superpower who operates by a different set of rules. Only the US could pass strictures about human rights conditions in other countries and still open a notorious prison where the worst kind of human rights abuses take place. This is also the reason why a supposedly liberal president remains a prisoner of helplessness when it comes to closing this prison. Of course, Barack Obama vowed to shutter the facility within a year when he came to office in 2009. Immediately after his inauguration, Obama called for a six-agency task force review of all detainees to decide whether they were to be prosecuted, released, transferred to other counties or categorized as "indefinite detainees." The White House or Obama's supporters would have us believe that stubborn Congressional resistance is what blocks the closure. But Obama is not entirely blameless. It is not a question of president proposing and the Congress disposing. Obama, critics and human rights activists point out, should have vetoed defense authorization bills that limited his ability to transfer the inmates, but he signed them. During the first years of his administration, Obama was more concerned with things like healthcare reform and economic crisis intervention. And he failed to press the Defense Department hard enough to approve the release and resettlement of detainees who aren't deemed a threat. When President George Bush opened the Gitmo in 2002 as part of his “war on terror”, there were nearly 800 inmates. Most were foot soldiers from the Afghan civil war. Some happened to be at the wrong place at the wrong time. Some were traded for money to the US authorities by tribal leaders and some were handed over to them just to settle personal scores. Everybody was rebranded as “unlawful enemy combatants” or “global terrorists.” Many were held without specific charges being brought; evidence against many others would be inadmissible in a normal civilian court. Deprived of the protections of the US Constitution and the Geneva Conventions, they are being held in solitary confinement. The number of detainees, which has dwindled to 245 when Obama took office now stands at 116. Some men were transferred to other countries. Some committed suicide, some died of natural causes and some were tortured to death. Yes, inmates were subject to all forms of torture including sexual abuses and water boarding. Whenever prisoners went on hunger strike, individually or collectively, to protest the torture and humiliation, they were force-fed using very coercive restraint chairs in a way that violates the ethical standards of the World Medical Association and American medical groups. Three doctors writing in the June 2013 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine called Guantanamo a “medical ethics-free zone.” The White House said on Tuesday it was in the final stage of drafting a plan for closing the Guantanamo prison. The plan would require Congress to change the law that now prohibits the movement of the detainees to the US. But even this latest push is running into Congress opposition. Obama's current and former secretaries of defense, who are to sign off on individual releases as required by law, are also against the new plan. “History will cast a harsh judgment on this aspect of our fight against terrorism,” Obama said in a 2013 speech, referring to Guantanamo. History's judgment will likely be harsher on this president who by his many acts of omission and commission seems to be playing into the hands of people like former Vice President Richard B. Cheney who thinks Guantanamo should be kept open until "the end of the war on terror" — a time, he noted, that "nobody can specify.”
