Guantanamo Bay Detention Camp - Term Paper Example

Guantanamo Bay Detention Camp Guantanamo Bay, also known as Gitmo, is a United s Detention Camp located in the Guantanamo Naval Base in South Eastern Cuba. The United States gained control of the Guantanamo Bay area in the 1903 Cuban-American treaty in which the United States gained the right to control the Cuban territory while at the same time recognizing the Cuban state sovereignty (Nofi, 112). In the year 1970, the United States began to use part of the Guantanamo Naval Base as a detention camp for Cubans and Haitians that were caught in the high sea trying to get into the United States illegally (Gott, 78). However, the detention camp later became a political tool, which politicians used for their selfish political agendas. This paper is a research paper on Guantanamo Bay; the paper explores the topic focusing on the political dimension of the detention camp. Guantanamo Bay Detention Camp was established in the year 2002, when Donald Rumsfeld was the United States secretary of defense. Rumsfeld stated that the main intention of building the Guantanamo Bay Prison was to detain prisoners of war and to try criminals accused of odious crimes (Rose, 32-33). Moreover, the Guantanamo camp was turned into a full-fledged ultra-modern detention camp for the criminals guilty of extra-ordinary crimes (Smith, 21). Although Rumsfeld had said during the opening of the Guantanamo Bay Camp that the aim of the detention camp would be to detain criminals convicted of crimes of very high magnitude, it later proved that the camp was actually just a political tool. In the book titled Bad Men: Guantanamo Bay and the Secret Prison the author C.S. Smith argued that the Bush administration targeted prisoners of war from Iraq, Iran, and Afghanistan. The author also believes that the 9/11 terrorist attacks in America prompted the building of the Guantanamo Bay Prison (Smith, 37). With terrorist organizations becoming a security challenge to the United States government, there was an urgent need for government officials to provide an appropriate facility for housing and interrogating suspects. In the year 2002, immediately after Guantanamo Bay was established, the detention camp began to receive Al-Qaida suspects. Guantanamo Bay Prison also began receiving accused members of the Taliban guerrilla fighters, which were adherents of Osama Bin Laden (Cucullu, 66). Shortly after the United States started interrogating and punishing prisoners in Guantanamo Bay Prison for their involvement on 9/11, human right groups began to accuse the Bush Administration for inhumane treatment of prisoners. Some of these human rights organizations include the Amnesty International, the International Committee of the Red Cross, the Human Rights Watch, and the United Nations. According to the Geneva Convention, although prisoners deserve to be punished for their crimes, prisoners, however, have some individual inalienable rights that the authorities ought to respect. Human rights activists accused the United States government for contravening the Geneva conventions (Bravin, 9-13). The government was accused of violating human rights by subjecting prisoners to torture. In the book titled Guantanamo: My Journey, the author D. Hicks discussed that detainees in Guantanamo Bay often complained of the brutal manner in which they were treated. The reason why prisoners are tortured is for the sole purpose of influencing them into revealing details of their accomplices, colleagues, and the criminal organization they are a part of (Hicks, 31-32). Besides the alleged inhumane treatment of prisoners held at the camp, the United States also denies Guantanamo Bay prisoners the legal means to challenge their detention. “The United States grossly violated the rights of the Guantanamo Bay prisoners by denying them the right to seek legal redress” (Smith, 72-73). After the 9/11 terrorist attacks, suspects of different nationalities were held in the Guantanamo Bay Prison and were denied the legal means of appealing incriminating evidence. Therefore, the US government was criticized for not following the due process of law in imprisoning criminals in the Guantanamo Bay Prison Camp, and for denying court trials. In the year 2004, Cuban diplomats accused the United States government for contriving the international law by denying the prisoners in the Guantanamo Bay the right to challenge their detention through legal action. The diplomats said that the U.S. government had to try the Guantanamo Bay prisoners, or repatriate them to their home countries where they would be tried. For this reason, the Cuba diplomats called for a UN investigation into Guantanamo Bay to find out if rights were being violated. After the investigation, in 2007, the United States gave out a report in which they said that the US violated the international law especially the provision on the international covenant on civil and political rights (Bravin, 97-98). In the year 2006, the United Nations unsuccessfully called for the closure of the Guantanamo Bay Detention Camp (Bravin, 65). In response to the accusations made against the United States for violating the rights of the Guantanamo Bay prisoners, former President Bush responded to his critics by saying that the United States was not obligated to grant constitutional rights to the prisoners in Guantanamo Bay because, Guantanamo Bay Prison is located outside the United States. Bush also said that the United States had not violated any provision of the Geneva Convention since the Geneva Convention did not address how states ought to treat terrorists, and those accused of being terrorists (Rose, 11). The Geneva Convention had only addressed the treatment of prisoners of war. The Bush administration also responded to the human rights organizations by stating that their condemnation of the United States was spurious and not based on facts. In the book titled Guantanamo: The War on Human Rights written by D. Rose the book mentions that in the year 2006, the United States Supreme Court ruled that the system of military commissions established to try selected detainees in Guantanamo Bay were unconstitutional. However, the Military Commission Act later restored the legality of the commissions in 2006. In the year 2008, the United States Supreme Court ruled that the foreign detainees in Guantanamo Bay did not have the right to challenge their detention in federal court. However, despite the ruling, U.S. authorities were unwilling to deport foreign detainees to their native countries because they may challenge their detention in line with their country’s constitution. Another reason why the United States was reluctant to release the detainees was that the countries where the prisoners originated from were unwilling, or had weak judiciaries that were not competent enough to handle criminal of the highest magnitude (Rose, 19-32). Although former President Bush said that the Guantanamo Bay detention camp was reserved only for high criminals, terror suspects, and prisoners of war, Guantanamo Bay Detention Camp became his tool for propaganda. The Bush administration used the camp to create the impression that the United States government was committed in fighting terrorism (Worthington, 14). To achieve this, the Bush administration resulted to propaganda that led to the detention of innocent people in the detention camp. In the year 2006, former President Bush came out publicly to announce that fourteen terror suspects had been captured by United States authorities and would be transferred to Guantanamo Bay Prison by CIA agents. In the public address, former President Bush claimed that the terror suspects had been held in foreign countries by secret agents. The suspects included Khalid Mohammed, Abu Zubaydah, and Ramzi Bin Al-Shibh. However, an investigation into their background later revealed that not one of the fourteen individuals had ever been previously charged with war crimes (Bravin, 107). Proving that former President Bush’s claim about the fourteen individuals being well-known terrorist was not based on factual evidence. President Bush’s public address on the issue was propaganda to win public approval. According to a 2006 report by the Centre for Policy Research, many of the 2005 Guantanamo Bay detainees were captured, not by the American authorities, but by the Afghans and the Pakistan civilians, in exchange of bounty payments offered by the American government (Cucullu, 72). Therefore, the Bush administration used these detainees to present the world with the illusion that the American government was winning the war against terrorism. Guantanamo Bay was utilized by the Bush administration for its political interest. This view is strongly supported by the author of the book Fighting Terrorism Versus Justice: Obviously, President Bush had to defend his actions and his government against the accusations that the Guantanamo Bay was meant for political expediency, President Bush had to do everything possible to create the impression that the Guantanamo Bay was a move in the right direction in fighting terrorism. (Mugambi, 7) In the year 2010, Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, assistant to the former United States Secretary of State Colin Powel, swore in an affidavit stating that former President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, and U.S. Secretary of State (at the time) Donald Rumsfeld, knew the majority of the detainees in the Guantanamo Bay Prison were innocent (Bravin, 132). Wilkerson stated on the affidavit that the Bush administration had imprisoned innocent people for political expediency. This claim by Wilkerson is perfectly in line with other claims made by foreign detainees claiming their innocence, and that there was no evidence that showed they had been involved in terrorism. Therefore, it shows that Guantanamo Bay was just a tool for politics and not for fighting terrorism as the public was led to believe. In the year 2005, the detainees in the Guantanamo Bay Prison went on a hunger strike in declaration of the brutal and inhumane treatment. However, the prisoners claimed that the hunger strike was unsuccessful because guards forcefully fed them. Guards allegedly shoved feeding tubes into the nasal cavities and down into their stomach, without using any sedation (Worthington, 142). The detainees claimed that the process utilized for feeding was indeed painful. Since Guantanamo Bay was established in 2002, there have been many reports of attempted suicides. In the year 2003 alone, there were twenty-three reported. By the year 2011, six people had successfully committed suicide in Guantanamo Bay (Bravin, 151-153). The suicides were suspected to be the result of brutal treatments that the prisoners are subjected to. Guantanamo Bay Prisoner Released without Charges In the year 2006, Murat Kurnaz, a former detainee of the Guantanamo Bay prison was released without charges. Kurnaz is a Turkish-born German and he was imprisoned in the Guantanamo Bay prison when he was eighteen years old. Turkish was captured and imprisoned in the Guantanamo Bay prison under suspicions that he was involved in terrorism activities in the USA. In his memoir, Five Years of my life: An Innocent man in the Guantanamo Bay, Kurnaz recounts his ordeals in the Guantanamo Bay detention camp. In this memoir, Kurnaz narrates how he was tortured during interrogation, including torture through water-boarding, and dry-boarding. Water-boarding torture technique involved placing a wet cloth over a supine prisoner, so that breathing slowly filled the lungs of the victim with water. Dry-boarding torture method, on the other hand involved the stuffing of the victim’s airwaves with rags, thus inducing asphyxiation. Kurnaz describes these two torture methods as being barbaric and inhuman. In this book, Kurnaz also wrote about the death of three detainees in the Camp on 10th June, 2006. Kurnaz attributes the death of the three prisoners to the harsh treatment in the prison by the prison guards. Kurnaz says in the book that three prisoners had either been beaten to death, or strangled. In this book, Kurnaz recounts in vivid and scarily details all the ill-treatments that the prisoners in the Guantanamo Bay detention camp received. Eventually, Kurnaz was released because there was no evidence, whatsoever, linking him with any terrorist activities in USA. Kurnaz’s account of the horrible treatment that the prisoners in the Guantanamo camp were subjected to shows that the Bush administration lied to the public about how the prisoners were being treated in the detention camp. In the 2008 presidential campaign, current President Barack Obama pledged to close Guantanamo Bay within a year if he were elected as a President of the United States. Obama, similar to Bush, resulted to using Guantanamo Bay Detention Camp for his political agenda. Upon being elected as President of the United States, President Obama ordered for the closure of Guantanamo Bay in 2009. Obama also ordered the detainees of Guantanamo Bay to be transferred to the United States for trial (Bravin, 164). Obama also ordered the interrogators in the Guantanamo Bay to use interrogation methods that are accepted by the United States Constitution. This means that Obama forbid the interrogators in the Guantanamo Bay from using torturous methods in interrogating the detainees in the detention camp. This was in fulfillment of his campaign pledge. However, the execution of President Obama’s order was delayed by the opposition from the Republican Party members and some members of the Democratic Party in congress. The main argument advanced by those opposed to the closure of the Guantanamo Bay Prison was that detaining the prisoners of Guantanamo Bay in the United State would jeopardize the security of the United States. In November 2009, due to the challenges posed by the politicians opposed to the closure of Guantanamo Bay, President Obama admitted that it would not be possible to close the detention camp within a year as he had planned. Barack Obama then gave an unspecified timeline for closing the detention camp saying that the detention camp would be closed probably in 2010. However, the detention camp was not closed. The following year, 2011, President Barack Obama signed defense authorization bail into law. The defense bill had provisions that restricted the transfer of Guantanamo Bay prisoners into the United States or to foreign countries. Therefore, this bail impeded the closure of Guantanamo Bay. President Barack Obama’s effort to close Guantanamo Bay did not materialize and Guantanamo Bay is still operating. In conclusion, as previously discussed on this paper, human rights activist oppose to the inhumane treatment of prisoners in custody. Sworn affidavits state that former government leaders were aware that innocent people were imprisoned in Guantanamo Bay and were not given the right to a trial. Guantanamo Bay Detention Camp was used as a propaganda tool for the Bush administration, to create the impression that the U.S. government was not going to stand idle in the fight against terror. President Barack Obama on the other hand, also, used Guantanamo Bay as a political tool to expose the weaknesses of the Bush administration. By ordering the closure of the Guantanamo Bay, Obama aimed at creating the impression to the public that his administration values fairness and change. Works Cited Bravin, J. The Terror Couts. USA: Yale University Press, 2013. Print. Cucullu, G.Inside Gitmo LP: The True Story Behind the Myths of Guantanamo Bay. USA: Haperluxe, 2009. Print. Mugambi, E. Fighting Terrorism versus Justice. Nairobi, Catholic University press, 2008. Print. Gott, R. Cuba: A New History. USA: Yale University Press, 2004. Print. Hicks, D. Guantanamo: My Journey. Australia: Random House, 2010. Print. Kunarz, M. Five Years of My Life: An Innocent Man in Guantanamo. USA: Palgrave, 2009. Nofi, A. The Spanish American War. Pennsylvania: Combined Books, 1996. Print. Rose, D. Guantanamo: The War on Human Rights. USA: New Press, 2006. Print. Smith, C.S. Bad Men: Guantanamo Bay and The Secret Prisons. USA: Phoenix, 2008. Print. Worthington, A. The Guantanamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s illegalPrison. USA: Pluto Press, 2007. Print. Read More