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This Saturday, January 11 marks the 18th anniversary of the opening of the infamous Guantanamo prison on the American base located on the island of Cuba. To date, around forty detainees (most Yemenis) are still languishing in this most expensive high security prison in the world, in defiance of international law, by imposing a rule: unlimited detention.
It was in January 2002 that the world discovered images of prisoners in orange coveralls, chained, blindfolded, in cages: it was the camp called "X-Ray". At the height of its operation, a few months after the September 11, 2001 attacks on the towers of the World Trade Center in New York, the detention center locked up 780 people suspected of being, according to the terms of the Bush administration, "Enemy combatants". Guantanamo represented a legal black hole in the vast " war on terror " undertaken by the team of President Georges W. Bush.
The Department of Justice had then stipulated that the base of Guantanamo was located outside the sovereign territory of the United States, and that the federal courts were therefore not competent to examine the requests in habeas corpus (which allow a detainee to challenge the lawfulness of his detention and give him a chance to be released) - the Supreme Court will overturn this principle in 2004 in a landmark decision, " Rasul against Bush ", then in 2008 , "Boumediene against Bush" of names of Guantanamo detainees whose lawyers were able to assert the right to defend the legality of their detention before federal courts .
According to a presidential memorandum of February 2002, the detainees did not enjoy the status of prisoners of war, and very sophisticated interrogation techniques were even approved.
Guantanamo Arrests, Transfers and Tortures
Hundreds of men have been arrested in Pakistan and Afghanistan where the Americans launched a response against Bin Laden and the Taliban, who were held responsible for the attacks in the United States. Many arrests have also been made in Egypt, in Bosnia, in defiance of international law.
Often tortured in countries less concerned with human rights principles, or in what have been called "black sites" of the CIA, secret American bases, these men were then transferred to the island of Guantanamo. They also suffered torture such as the torture of the bathtub (water-boarding) and ill-treatment (sensory deprivation, auditory torture, forced feeding when they were on hunger strike, extreme cold in metal cells, etc.).
Lawyer Pardiss Kebriaei of the Center for Constitutional Rights represented in 2016 two of the eleven detainees who filed a complaint against the American state. They believed that they were illegally kept in Guantanamo because they were Muslim, although no charges were brought against them. " One of the men we represented in this complaint is a 43-year-old Yemeni , explains Pardiss Kebriaei, his name is Sharqawi Al Hajj, he has been detained without reason since 2002. Before his transfer to Guantanamo, he was held incommunicado in a black CIA site for two years where he was severely tortured. He was regularly beaten, electrically tortured, kept in solitary confinement in the dark, subjected to hearing torture, concealed from the International Committee of the Red Cross. He is taking treatment for chronic pain and may not survive an additional three or seven years in prison. "
Forties still detained indefinitely in Guantanamo
Among the nearly 800 detainees who transited through Guantanamo, the vast majority were released. About 197 of them (from Yemen, Algeria, China - like the Uighurs - or even from Syria) have been transferred to 59 third countries, unable to reach their countries of origin for security reasons.
Today, around forty are still incarcerated on the American base, but they denounce their unlimited, illegal, arbitrary, discriminatory detention without fair trial.
In fact, less than a dozen have been charged by the United States. These defendants could be brought before highly contested US military courts. But " 18 years after the arrival of the first detainee in Guantanamo, no military commission has so far been able to carry out a single judgment to its end, " said lawyer Rob Kirsch of the Wilmerhale law firm. based in Boston, which represented several Guantanamo detainees.
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The 30-odd other prisoners - who are also still being held in Guantanamo prison - may never be charged, said Rob Kirsch. They were subjected to ill-treatment, which could make it difficult for the American authorities to use the evidence they were able to obtain. " The US Defense Department has never admitted it, but many of them have been tortured, and the evidence obtained under torture can never be used, even in military commissions, " said Rob Kirsch.
Guantanamo will remain open indefinitely, says Trump
Even under the Obama administration, military commissions had decided that 48 detainees could not be prosecuted or released. They remain in limbo, 26 of them are still detained by the Trump administration without any charge or trial.
Taking the opposite view from Barack Obama who had promised to close Guantanamo and tried to empty his prisoners by transferring them to third countries - Congress prevented him from doing so - Donald Trump in 2018 signed a decree stipulating that he would keep Guantanamo open indefinitely.
No prisoner transfer has taken place since taking office. He even announced that he wanted to send "bad guys", bad people, linked to the organization of the Islamic State in particular. But he did nothing with it. However, he did not transfer any prisoner.
Several organizations defending constitutional rights represent these detainees, like the CCR (American Center for Constitutional Rights), worried about the latest decisions of Donald Trump. " Under the Obama administration, there were agents responsible for negotiating with foreign countries to repatriate or relocate detainees from Guantanamo, " said CCR lawyer Pardiss Kebriaei . " All these procedures have been stopped, " she laments. " Trump has no plans to transfer any detainees, not even the five who are released ."
The financial argument to close the most expensive prison in the world
The plight of prisoners languishing at Guantanamo Bay does not interest the majority of American public opinion. " Unfortunately, only the financial argument could hold the attention of American voters ," regrets lawyer Rob Kirsch. Because the Guantanamo detention center costs $ 13 million per year per prisoner. The cost of a prisoner in US federal high security prisons is less than 1% of the cost of Guantanamo inmates, says Rob Kirsch.
In addition, the infrastructure is aging and will require new investments. The forty prisoners are also doomed to age in Guantanamo.