Tuesday morning, a reporter asked President Barack Obama for his views on the latest developments at the Guantanamo Bay prison camp, where at least half of the 166 prisoners have been leading a hunger strike to protest their decade-long, due-process-free incarceration. The president responded unequivocally, “The idea that we would still maintain forever a group of individuals who have not been tried, that is contrary to who we are. It is contrary to our interests and it needs to stop.” Unfortunately, President Obama’s eloquent words have not been matched by the corresponding course of action. Indeed, the policies pursued during his presidency have served to bolster, rather than eliminate, the principle of due-process-free detention.
In his answer, Obama invoked the widely held presumption that he would have already closed the prison camp if not for the obstruction of Congress. In actuality, President Obama’s 2009 proposal to close Guantanamo would have transferred the prisoners to a federal prison in Thompson, Ill., where they would have continued to be incarcerated without charges or a trial. Thus, while the president technically did attempt to close Guantanamo, his proposal missed the point entirely by still enshrining the principle of due-process-free imprisonment. The central objection to Guantanamo is the denial of due process for the prisoners; merely shifting the prisoners’ location does nothing to fix this injustice. For this reason, the large majority of the Senate Democratic caucus voted against the president’s proposal in 2009.
Furthermore, the president has the authority to begin to address this injustice immediately. The National Defense Authorization Act bestows upon the president the power to transfer prisoners if their confinement threatens the national security of the United States. In his remarks, Obama rightfully noted the prison camp serves as a recruitment tool for terrorists. So far, 86 of the prisoners have been cleared for release. The president has the unilateral power to grant them their freedom, yet Obama has not exercised that power. Instead, he has exploited public misunderstanding of the issue in order to falsely heap the blame on Congress, when he himself has the power and the responsibility to address the decade-long imprisonment of those who have had no access to a fair trial, the most fundamental and elementary requirement of American justice.
Once upon a time, Obama represented a refreshing break from the lawlessness of the Bush administration, campaigning in 2007 and 2008 on the promise to restore both the rule of law and America’s moral standing in the world. After taking office, he abandoned his campaign pledges and kept the civil liberties and national security policies of the Bush administration intact, including the imprisonment of many at Guantanamo Bay who were rounded up and taken into custody “without regard for whether they were truly enemy combatants, or in fact whether many of them were enemies at all,” in the words of Colin Powell’s former chief of staff, Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson
To be fair, there has been the usual amount of Republican demagoguery on this issue, often centering on the typical, unsupported assertion that the prison camp is full of terrorists eager to bring death and destruction to the U.S., despite the fact that the overwhelming majority have never had charges or a trial brought against them, let alone been convicted of any crime. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged architect of the 9/11 attacks, is at the prison camp, but he is one of only six to have received a military-commission hearing. Of the remaining 160 prisoners, 86 have been cleared for release. Regarding the other 74, the government either promises to eventually try them or acknowledges that its lacks the evidence to prosecute them but still considers them too dangerous to release. All in all, more prisoners have died at the camp (10) than have been convicted by military commissions (six).
The prisoners conducting the hunger strike at Guantanamo are forcing the country to confront a problem that many would like to forget altogether. After a decade of due-process-free imprisonment thousands of miles away from their families, a pervading sense of hopelessness and desperation has taken over at the prison camp. The government has responded by force-feeding many of the participating prisoners, a practice which “violates core ethical values of the medical profession,” as every patient “has the right to refuse medical intervention, including life-sustaining interventions,” according to the president of the American Medical Association. This is where we stand in 2013: the prisoners, including many who have been cleared for release but have not been freed, would rather die than continue living a tortured existence of lawless incarceration. If Obama’s statement that holding prisoners without trial is contrary to who we are, he must act on his word. Until he takes action to address the injustice, starting with the freeing of the 86 prisoners who have been cleared for release, that is exactly who we are.
Have an opinion on Guantanamo? Tell us your thoughts! Please send all feedback to opinion@dailycardinal.com.
