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April 26, 2011
Barack Obama has been unable, and unwilling, to shut Guantánamo Bay more than two years after he ordered its closure. The continued existence of the extrajudicial prison camp has become a symbol to many of the gap between the promise and rhetoric of his early presidency.
Steve Bell
Early moves by the White House to transfer these detainees to a facility in the US, while it figured out what to do with them, foundered after the Senate voted down a budget for it amid rising public resistance in the US to the idea of allowing potentially dangerous terrorists on to US soil.
With the Guantánamo files---750 leaked US military files containing secret assessments of Guantánamo detainees--- we have an insight into the extraordinarily thin material presented as "evidence" in the assessments. This evidence must be treated with scepticism as a number of files contain information known to have been extracted under torture, which has in several cases subsequently been found unreliable. It is a Kafkaesque world of the national security state.
The files spell out the extent of involvement US authorities believe each detainee has had with al-Qaida, the Taliban or other terror groups, an assessment of their intelligence value and the threat they are considered to pose if released. In each case they also make a recommendation for the future detention, release or transfer of the detainee.
Many had no connection to al-Qaida or the Taliban leader. Some were uneducated farmers who were in the wrong place at the wrong time. No matter. The myth that the prison held "the worst of the worst" terrorists, picked up on the battlefields of Afghanistan, was what was important.
The Conservative's big concern is to use military tribunals to extract intelligence and to try terrorists because of their distrust of the ordinary judicial system to fulfill the goals of criminal justice system, which for them, is to send people to prison and to execute them. The shift from criminal to enemy is cloaked in law.
This gives the national security state greater freedom to deal with its enemies, including people who have no link to a war in any normal sense of the term on the ground of protecting a liberal democratic society and the rule of law. Hence the examples of the miscarriage of justice at Guantánamo Bay.
This is not a concern for conservatives because their political agenda is one of rights curtailment; a systematic attack on human liberties; a displacement of peace by war, and a displacement of the rule of law by the state of exception.
So the surreal system of Guantanamo Bay remains open for business despite the fact that over half the remaining 172 prisoners have been cleared for release by Obama's own task force. Guantánamo will remain active in all its forms: indefinite detention; military commissions; and transfers.
Guantánamo embodies the failure of America, Britain and Australia's Afghan war, which began amid bombast in 2001, and has since collapsed into yet another quagmire. Retreat under the cover of spin is the only viable option.
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I always hope that the people running the world are actually a bit smarter and more reasonable than they seem to be. So often it turns out they're even more stupid and unreasonable than you'd think possible. This is one of those times.