APD Review | Trump should not keep Guantanamo open

APD NEWS

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By APD writer Lu Jiafei

Washington, Feb.2 (APD) --Every U.S. president makes promises, and every president breaks promises. What the current host of the White House has been doing indicates that he wants to be the exception.

However, just like his fateful decision to withdraw America from the Paris Climate Agreement and to unilaterally recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, as well as his threat to dump the Iran nuclear deal, Donald Trump’s latest executive order to keep open the notorious Guantanamo Bay detention facility is a mistake by a president eagerly to please his constituency.

In his State of the Union address early this week, Trump proclaimed that he had signed an executive order to keep the Guantanamo prison open and to direct Defense Secretary Jim Mattis “to re- examine our military detention policy,” including “policies governing the transfer of individuals to Guantanamo.”

Trump also added that he expected that “in many cases” captured terrorists would again be sent to Guantanamo.

We could only hope that Trump’s doubling down on the Guantanamo issue is simply a symbolic posture to keep another promise to his voters. But if Trump is serious about loading up the Guantanamo prison with “bad dudes”- as claimed by him back on campaign trail - the U.S. global campaign to fight terrorism will be doomed to repeat a serious mistake, and the whole world could suffer the consequence.

Opening in 2002, the Guantanamo prison was designated by then President George W. Bush’s Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld as a place for “the worst of the worst.” But the prison ultimately turned out to be a synonym for the “torture chamber” and for inmates. Most of them were of insignificant background.

Without granting basic rights to the inmates, the Guantanamo prison has become an extrajudicial haven for inhumane brutality and humiliation, and by resorting to tortures such as waterboarding, electric shocks, sexual humiliation and sleep deprivation, Guantanamo has failed to become a prevention of extremism.

Some people may argue that the Guantanamo prison is now expertly run by the U.S. military in a humane way. Unfortunately, its image of symbolizing abuse of Muslim prisoners cannot and would not be easily shed away.

And what is worse, guess who is now living in the White House? It is Trump, the very man viewed by Muslims around the world as one of the men most hostile towards the Islam religion.

In another word, the Guantanamo prison has for long become a recruiting tool for al-Qaeda and other terrorist groups, and Trump’s ascent to power has unfortunately fortified that point.

That is the main reason that Trump’s two immediate predecessors, namely Bush and Barack Obama, went to great lengths to seek closure of the prison.

In his memoir, Bush wrote that while he believed that opening the Guantanamo after the 9/11 terrorist attacks “was necessary,” “the detention facility had become a propaganda tool for our enemies and a distraction for our allies.”

Both Bush and Obama had worked but failed to find a way to close the prison. Unfortunately, their successor Trump decided to reverse the path forward and by doing that, he is doing the world more harm than good.


Lu Jiafei, researcher of APD Institute. After spending one year in Palestine covering the Israeli-Palestinian conflict between 2013 and 2014, Lu moved to Washignton, D.C. and covered the 2016 U.S. presidential election till the very end of Donald Trump’s upset victory. He is a political contributor to APD.

(ASIA PACIFIC DAILY)