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Cox & Stokes: US Foreign Policy

Goodbye Guantanamo?

As one of his first acts as US president, Barack Obama signed an executive order on 22 January 2009 authorizing the gradual closure of the Guantanamo Bay detention camp, with an additional personal assurance that the camp would be closed 'no later than one year from now.' Reiterating the sentiment of his emotive inauguration speech, where Obama urged that Americans should 'reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals', the new President declared after signing the order that the US would continue to 'prosecute the ongoing struggle against violence and terrorism' but would do so 'in a manner that is consistent with our values and our ideals.'

Along with the order to close Guantanamo, executive orders suspending the use of certain torture methods, officially referred to as 'enhanced interrogation techniques', and the practice of rendition were also signed. Rendition refers to the transfer of terror suspects to so-called 'black sites', secret CIA prisons outside the US; a further order mandated the closure of such black sites, but without specifying a time frame within which this would occur.

In authorizing these measures President Obama made a symbolic break with the policies of the George W. Bush era. The orange boiler suits worn by the inmates at Guantanamo Bay's Camp X-Ray have undoubtedly become emblematic of the 'War on Terror' and – to critics of the Bush administration – of its worst excesses. The transfer of detainees to Guantanamo Bay, or 'GITMO' as the US naval base in Cuba is sometimes also known, began in January 2002 when 20 men suspected of being Al Qaeda members were transported there after being captured in Afghanistan. Since then around 700 prisoners have passed through the site, the vast majority of whom never faced trial. Indeed, human rights groups such as Amnesty International consistently argued that the camp contravened international law. Detainees at the camp were not treated as criminal suspects (under civilian law) or prisoners of war (under international law and with the protection of the Geneva Conventions), but simply as 'enemy combatants' which accorded them an ambiguous legal status. Those who were tried faced secret military tribunals in Guantanamo. Added to this, several prisoners were subjected to waterboarding, in which a prisoner is held under running water in a simulation of drowning, which is generally acknowledged to contravene Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions.

The Bush administration justified the creation and maintenance of Camp X-Ray on the basis that the detention of terror suspects necessitated the use of exceptional measures but President Obama's initial moves seem to indicate a conscious move away from this position. 'Anybody in custody and control of American forces is governed by the Geneva Conventions', a senior official for the new administration assured reporters in the wake of the executive orders. Yet GITMO still has around 250 inmates, all accused of having links to terrorism, and this still leaves a complex political problem for the Obama administration. 21 of these inmates have cases pending, and if evidence in those cases was obtained via 'enhanced interrogation techniques' it would not be admissible in a civilian court. The five detainees charged in connection with the terrorist attacks of 9/11 have already declared that they want to plead guilty and will almost certainly have to face a judicial process at some point. This raises questions about the feasibility of trying detainees in any legal forum other than the type of military tribunal used previously at Guantanamo. There are serious doubts about the merits of simply releasing detainees, as the Pentagon recently claimed that 61 former Guantanamo prisoners have returned to fight the US in places like Afghanistan and Iraq, and returning detainees to their home countries or other states is also politically difficult. Hence, ordering the closure of Camp X-Ray may have helped define the Obama administration's attitude to the combating terrorism, but the challenges facing the new administration in dismantling the camp at Guantanamo might have instructive parallels on the difficulty of implementing a more substantive reorientation of counterterrorism strategy.   

Think Points:

  • Does President Obama's executive order to close the Guantanamo Bay detention camp signal the end of the 'War on Terror'?

  • Is the use of torture in the interrogation of terrorist suspects justifiable?

  • Why have some argued that the classification of Guantanamo detainees as 'enemy combatants' is problematic?

  • What does the nature of Camp X-Ray tell us about the approach to counterterrorism adopted by the Bush administration?

  • How different is counterterrorism strategy likely to be under President Obama?