Guantanamo prison

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July 19, 2021 "Our goal is to close Guantanamo Bay". White House spokesman Jen Psaki said today, commenting on the first transfer out of the prison complex of the American naval base in Cuba that took place under the Biden administration, with the repatriation of a 56-year-old Moroccan citizen.



Psaki recalled that to date there are 39 detainees still present in Guantanamo, of these, 10 can be transferred to a country that guarantees strict surveillance and 17 can be admitted to periodic review.



Joe Biden therefore reopens the doors of Guantanamo with the aim of emptying the field as much as possible by 11 September, the twentieth anniversary of the attacks by al Qaeda, and to permanently close the detention center by the end of his first presidential term. The 56-year-old Moroccan Abdul Latif Nasir, who has been locked up for 20 years without ever being charged with any charge, is the first prisoner since the Biden era to be repatriated to his country, handed over to the authorities in Rabat.



There are now 39 left, and the White House hopes to transfer another group of prisoners overseas within a few weeks, then relocating the remaining inmates to US prisons. A turning point, therefore, after Donald Trump had signed the decree ordering to keep the field open, effectively blocking any transfer. A blockade that Nasir himself had stumbled upon, who should have returned to Morocco as early as 2016. The line chosen by Biden, explain sources of the US administration, is to empty Guantanamo gradually and without great fanfare, or without repeating what some consider a mistake made by Barack Obama: giving a broad echo to a very controversial story after signing the decree for the closure of the detention center at the beginning of his first term.For many others, however, despite having failed the final goal, Obama must be credited with having reduced the population of the camp from 245 to 41 inmates.



This is also thanks to the pressure of human rights associations and part of public opinion who have always considered the conditions and type of detention practiced in Guantanamo to be immoral, with most of the prisoners never really indicted. And not a few observers have even come to speak of torture. President George W. Bush opened the superprison in 2002 to lock up terrorist suspects linked to the September 11, 2001 massacres. The peak reached was about 800 inmates, including many jihadist militants captured in Afghanistan. 80 had been a member of a non-violent, albeit illegal, Islamic group in Morocco, and then in 1996 he was recruited to fight in Chechnya, eventually ending up in Afghanistan where he was trained in an al Qaeda camp.He was captured by American forces and sent to Guantanamo in 2002. From 2005 to 2007 he lived in solitary confinement in a cell without windows and with the electric light constantly on. He has never enjoyed a regular trial and has never been granted the right to consult a lawyer.