Guantánamo – growing old Summary: Trump's promises on Guantánamo mercifully not carried out. The Commander worries about the future and is sacked. In our posting of 5 January 2017 we considered the prospects at the end of the second Obama administration for the prison at Guantánamo Bay. Guantánamo was established in 2002 and considered by the George W Bush and subsequent US administrations to be outside US legal jurisdiction and therefore not covered by the Geneva conventions, giving the US a free hand to deal with those suspected of involvement in al-Qa’ida and other terrorist crimes. That included freedom to use torture although torture is banned under international law in all circumstances. By 2017 releases and a few deaths had reduced the number of prisoners, originally nearly 800, to 41. Donald Trump had said during his campaign that he would keep Guantánamo open and “load it up with some bad dudes.” He and Mike Pompeo, at that time director of the CIA, had also reportedly said that they believed that waterboarding was within the law and was "absolutely fine… We should go much stronger than waterboarding.’ In January 2018 President Trump signed an executive order keeping the prison open. In May 2018 one more prisoner was transferred to Saudi Arabia, reducing the number in Guantánamo to 40. Since then and until recently Guantánamo has largely been out of the mainstream media. Nothing more has been heard of the commitment to send more prisoners there, and waterboarding and other gross abuses have not been resumed. But there has been a great deal of administrative and legal activity, mainly about individual prisoners. Attempts to bring some of them to trial have been complicated by various obstacles, often stemming from the issue of torture, and in the last month this has had some media coverage. An account of the problems of one troublesome legal process is at link and another at link. A 5 April New York Times report is headed "Guantánamo Trials Grapple With How Much Evidence to Allow About Torture". A long, disgusting and very human story of the experiences of another detainee in the New Yorker is headed "Guantánamo diary and the American slave narrative". In some cases complicated legal proceedings have followed in other countries to which prisoners had been released, for example a case just concluded in Canada. On 27 April the New York Times reported that planning is in hand for Guantánamo prisoners to grow old and die at Guantánamo (the oldest prisoner is now 71). Under the Geneva conventions, from which Guantánamo has after all not completely escaped, the prison is obliged to offer prisoners medical care comparable with that offered to their own staff, who number 1,800; the staff have access to a military hospital in the US but Guantánamo prisoners are forbidden by law from entering the US. The Guantánamo commander, Rear Admiral John Ring, told reporters about the questions policymakers face. “A lot of my guys are prediabetic. Am I going to need dialysis down here? I don’t know. Someone’s got to tell me that. Are we going to do complex cancer care down here? I don’t know. Someone’s got to tell me that.” Already prisoners suffer typical middle-aged conditions as well as conditions arising from torture such as sodomisation. A report in Defence One further quotes Ring: “ ‘We’re in the early stages of feeling this out.’ In the coming months, he is sending a team to study how Federal Bureau of Prisons facilities in the United States handle end-of-life care for elderly prisoners." On 28 April April Ring, who had seven more weeks to serve (and had previously commanded the giant aircraft carrier USS Nimitz), was fired due to a "loss of confidence in his ability to command," according to the US Southern Command.