Closing Guantánamo? - TomDispatch.com

Closing Guantánamo? - TomDispatch.com Karen Greenberg, The Last Prisoners? Posted on October 5, 2023 In September 2007, Karen Greenberg ominously titled her third report for TomDispatch “Guantanamo Forever.” Give her credit. So many years ago, she grasped all too clearly the nightmarish nature of that bastion of injustice. Sixteen years and three presidencies later, 21 years after that offshore prison from hell was founded by President George W. Bush and crew, it’s hard (as you’ll see with today’s piece) not to simply use that title again. As I wrote in my introduction to her piece then, “As the presidential election season heats up, Republican candidates have opted for ‘Guantanamo-forever’ policy positions. Retiring Republican Senator Chuck Hagel recently complained that the notorious detention facility — once the proud public face of the President’s attempt to move incarceration and mistreatment offshore and beyond the reach of American courts — has bizarrely enough become ‘a Republican litmus test.’ At the same time, at Guantanamo itself, anger and factionalism are on the rise, not among prisoners but warders, while the attempt to set up what Wall Street Journal reporter Jess Bravin calls ‘a free-standing court system to try alleged foreign terrorists’ founders for the nine hundredth time. More than five years after being inaugurated, the prison complex has so far adjudicated exactly one case to the point of conviction — a simple plea bargain (essentially negotiated between President Bush and Australian Prime Minister John Howard) that transferred small-fry Taliban follower David Hicks back to Australia where he is to be freed at the end of this year.” It’s true, as Greenberg notes, that those offshore military commission trials of leftover Gitmo prisoners are finally proceeding in their forever fashion and perhaps someday that prison will indeed be no more. But when it comes to the fallout from this country’s endless war on terror, which turned into an endless war of terror, some things never seem to end. After all, only now is Congress even considering the possibility of taking back from the president the power to make war globally, thanks to that Authorization for the Use of Military Force, or AUMF, it passed three days after the 9/11 attacks (with but a single negative vote, that of the remarkable Barbara Lee), and the one it passed in 2002 before the invasion of Iraq and never rescinded. And don’t count on that happening either! The question of whether those forever wars and the forever prison that went with them will ever be truly ended still remains up for grabs, but let TomDispatch regular Karen Greenberg explain so many years (and articles) later. Tom