Guantanamo Bay by Sabina Arias

Important Points:

1.     After the attacks of September 11, 2001, the Bush administration began crafting a new set of policies, procedures, and practices for detainees captured in military operations in international territory.

2.     Guantanamo Bay was opened in 2002 and holds up to 800 prisioners, from roughly 44 different countries.

3.     Many of the interrogation methods used on these prisioners violate the laws of war, international human rights law, and US federal criminal law. 

4.     The coercive methods that senior US officials approved include tactics that the US has condemned as torture or ill-treatment when practiced by others. An example of this is waterboarding. The USA government has long recognized waterboarding as a form of torture yet they still use it to interrogate Guantanamo Bay prisioners.

5.     The US government appointed lawers to draft legal memoranda that sought to provide legal cover for administration policies on detention and interrogation, in other words to justify torture.

6.     In 2007, Human Rights Watch collected information on some 350 cases of alleged abuse involving more than 600 US personnel.

7.     Despite all of the information about torture, very few military personnel have been punished and not a single CIA official has been prosecuted. 

8.     In 2009 Obama abolished secret CIA prisons and banned the use of torture, but could never close it down.

9.     As of 2015, the estimated cost of maintenance of each prisioner is somewhere between 3,7 and 4,2 millions dolars per year.

10.  As of May of 2016 there were only 8 prisoners left, 9 of them had accusations against them, but it can take years for them to be sent back to their homes and a lot of them try to kill themselves by starvation. 

There has been evidence of ex-president George W. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, Ex-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and CIA director George Tennet of authorizing these activities.

Questions:

1.What is international law?

2. Is there such thing as global human rights?

3. Is Guantanamo Bay considered international territory?

4. Do these prisioners have any human rights at all?

5. What can we do as citizens to help this situation?

6. Will Guantanamo Bay close down soon?

7. What can international human rights organizations do to stop the violation of human rights in cases like these?

8. What can US citizens do to prosecute those responsible for torturing and those in higher ranks for allowing these procedures?

9.     It seems unfair that this US military base was imposed on Cubans from Guantanamo, has there been any action taken from their part?

10.  How does it influence them?

Works Cited:

Greenberg, Karen J . “Qué impide realmente el cierre de la prisión en Guantanamo?

Cubadebate, 9 May 2016, www.cubadebate.cu/especiales/2016/05/09/que-impide-realmente-el-cierre-de-la-prision-en-guantanamo/#.WdQ3ONSnHdQ

“Getting Away with Torture.” Human Rights Watch, 12 July 2011,

www.hrw.org/report/2011/07/12/getting-away-torture/bush-administration-and-mistreatment-detainees#page * I think they didn’t include the author(s) of this essay for security purposes of Human Rights Watch.