The Guardian Weekly 14 January 202232 Spotlight
North AmericaO
n 4 January 2002, Brigadier
General Michael Lehnert
received an urgent deploy-
ment order. He would take
a small force of marines and sailors
and build a prison camp in the US-run
military enclave on Cuba’s south coast,
Guantánamo Bay.
Lehnert had 96 hours to deploy and
build the fi rst 100 cells, in time for the
fi rst plane load of captives arriving
from the battlefi eld in Afghanistan on
11 January. The job was done on time:
a grid of chain-link cages surrounded
by barbed wire and six plywood guard
towers manned by snipers. There were
fi ve windowless huts for interroga-
tions. It was named Camp X-Ray.
Camp X-Ray was built in three days,
but the sprawling Guantánamo Bay
prison camp that grew out of it has
proved very hard to dismantle. About
780 detainees have been held there
over the past 20 years, many of them
swept up arbitrarily. One university
study found that 55% of them had not
committed hostile acts against the US
or its allies. Three of the past four US
presidents (Donald Trump being the
exception) have tried to close it, but 20
years on it is still there, a legal anomaly
and lead weight wrapped around the
country’s global reputation.
As the 20th anniversary approached,
Lehnert, now retired, appeared at
a Senate hearing and looked back in
regret. “The speed of Guantánamo’s
creation and the urgency to gain infor-
mation had bad consequences,” he
told senators. “I am not an attorney,
but even I know that when you forgo
generations of legal thought and prece-
dent, bad things happen.”
Lehnert had been part of a group
of military offi cers who tried to make
Guantánamo a conventional prisoner-
of-war camp, subject to the Geneva
conventions, but they were overruledby their superiors in the Pentagon,
which had chosen the site precisely
because it would lie outside the rule
of law. “It turned out to be a horrible
mistake,” said Daniel Fried, a career
US diplomat who was working in the
Bush White House at the time.
And it has been a hard mistake for
the US to erase, as Fried knows fi rst
hand. In the Obama administration,
he was made special envoy for closing
Guantánamo. He had some success
in the fi rst year in persuading allied
governments to accept Guantánamo
detainees, and the camp’s population
was reduced to 41, but Barack Obama
failed to fulfi l his pledge to shut it
down completely. His administration
gave up on eff orts to hold trials in New
York and place long-term detainees in
an empty prison in Illinois, in the face
of furious local opposition.
Guantánamo Bay has been left to
fester. Conditions have improved but
the fact of detention without trial
remains a constant. Over its 20 years ,
only 12 detainees have been charged,
and only two have been convicted by
the military commissions.
The trial of the fi ve accused of
direct participation in the 9/11 plot,
including its supposed mastermind,
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, has not
even started. They are entering the10th year of pre-trial hearings. At the
other end of the scale, 13 “low-value”
inmates have been cleared for trans-
fer, in some cases many years ago.
Tawfi q al-Bihani, a Yemeni picked up
in Iran in 2001, was recommended
for repatriation in 2010. But because
of congressional Republican opposi-
tion, bureaucratic inertia and the diffi -
culty of fi nding countries to accept the
prisoners, they are still on the island.
Chairing last month’s judiciary
committee hearing, the Democratic
senator Dick Durbin noted: “A genera-
tion of confl ict has come and gone yet
the Guantánamo detention facility is
still open, and every day it remains
open is an aff ront to our system of
justice and the rule of law. It is where
due process goes to die.”
It is also where an increasing num-
ber of inmates face death by natural
causes. The Pentagon has asked for
$88m to build a hospice for ageing
detainees, the New York Times has
reported. The prison camp already
costs nearly $14m per detainee, com-
pared with about $80,000 per inmate
in US “supermax” prisons. President
Joe Biden, like Obama, has pledged to
close the camp, but so far has reduced
the prison population by just one.
JULIAN BORGER IS THE GUARDIAN’S
WORLD AFFAIRS EDITORUNITED STATES‘ A n a ff ront to justice ’
The festering legacy
of Guantánamo Bay
By Julian Borger WASHINGTON US military
police with
a prisoner at
Camp X-Ray in
2002
SHANE T MCCOY/
REUTERSAnalysis‘A h u g e
political
albatross’About 30%
of former
Guantánamo
detainees who
were resettled in
third countries
have not been
granted legal
status. Of the
hundreds
released , about
150 were sent to
third countries
in bilateral
agreements
brokered by the
US, because their
home countries
were considered
dangerous to
return to.
Many remain
in legal limbo
and analysis
indicates that
about 45 men
have not been
given residency
documents upon
resettlement.
Noa Yachot