Washington, D.C. – The detention center in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, turns 23 years old on Saturday.
For Mansoor Adayfi, a former inmate at the prison, the anniversary marks 23 years of “injustice, lawlessness, abuse of power, torture and indefinite detention.”
Only 15 prisoners remain at the U.S. military prison at Gitmo, which once housed about 800 Muslim men – a declining number that gives advocates hope that the facility will eventually close and turn the page on the dark chapter of history it represents .
But Adayfi, who now serves as the Guantanamo Project coordinator at the advocacy group CAGE International, says truly closing Gitmo means delivering justice to its current and former detainees.
“The United States must admit its wrongdoing and issue a formal and official apology to the victims and survivors,” Adayfi told Al Jazeera. “There must be reparations, compensation and accountability.”
Guantanamo opened in 2002 to house prisoners of the so-called “War on Terror,” a response to the September 11, 2001 attacks in the United States.
In countries around the world, detainees have been arrested on suspicion of links to al-Qaeda and other groups. Many suffered horrific torture in secret detention centers known as black sites before being transferred to Guantánamo.
At Gitmo, prisoners had few legal rights. Even those cleared for release through Guantánamo’s alternative justice system, known as military commissions, remained detained for years with no opportunity to challenge their detention.
And so prison has become synonymous with the worst abuses of the U.S. government in the post-9/11 era.
In recent weeks, outgoing President Joe Biden’s administration has accelerated the transfer of detainees from Guantanamo before his term ends on January 20.
On Monday, the US government released 11 Yemeni prisoners and resettled them in Oman. Last month, two prisoners were transferred to Tunisia and Kenya.
‘Crazy’
Daphne Eviatar, director of the Security with Human Rights (SWHR) program at Amnesty International USA, said closure of the facility was possible.
She said the remaining detainees could be transferred to other countries or to the United States, where they would go through the American justice system.
Congress imposed a ban on the transfer of Gitmo detainees to U.S. soil in 2015. But Eviatar believes the White House can work with lawmakers to lift the ban, especially given that there are so few prisoners left at the facility.
“It is a symbol of lawlessness, of Islamophobia,” Eviatar said of Guantanamo.
“It is a complete violation of human rights. For the United States, which has held so many people for so long without rights, without charge or trial, it is simply terrible. And the fact that it’s still going on today, 23 years later, is crazy.”
Barack Obama made closing the prison one of his key promises when he ran for president in 2008, but after taking office his plans faced strong opposition from Republicans. Toward the end of his second term, Obama expressed regret over his failure to close the facility early in his presidency.
According to the Pentagon, three of the 15 remaining Gitmo inmates are eligible for release. Three other people can contact Guantánamo’s Periodic Review Board, which assesses whether it is safe to transfer detainees.
“We still hope that President Biden can transfer more detainees before he leaves office,” Eviatar told Al Jazeera.
While President-elect Donald Trump previously promised to keep the prison open, Eviatar said he viewed the facility as potentially inefficient.
Plea offers
But the Friends Committee on National Legislation (FCNL), a Quaker social justice advocacy group, stressed the urgency for Biden to act before Trump takes office.
“With President-elect Trump strongly opposed to closing Guantanamo, the need for President Biden to close the prison is more urgent than ever,” said Devra Baxter, program assistant for militarism and human rights at FCNL, in a statement.
“The closure of Guantanamo will only occur through the transfer of the final three men who have not yet been charged with a crime and by entering into plea agreements with those who have been charged with a crime.”
However, instead of entering into plea deals for the inmates, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin has tried to scuttle deals for three 9/11 suspects made with military prosecutors to spare the prisoners the death penalty in exchange for guilty pleas.
Now courts are examining the validity of the agreements and Austin’s veto of them.
Eviatar said Austin’s push to thwart the plea deals amounted to political interference.
“It’s a very strange situation. I don’t understand why the Biden administration, which says it wants to close Guantanamo, would then bring in the Secretary of Defense and stop the settlement agreements. It makes no sense.”
CAGE’s Adayfi said the plea agreement debacle shows there is no functioning justice system at Guantanamo.
“This is a big joke,” he said. “There is no justice in Guantanamo. There is no law. There is absolutely nothing. It is one of the greatest human rights violations of the 21st century.”
Adayfi added that the US can have its ideals of freedom, democracy and human rights or Guantanamo, but not both.
“I think they have Guantánamo,” he said.
