credit: UN Photo/Mark Garten
By Sue Gloor
Though President Obama pledged on his inauguration day to close the terrorist detention center Guantánamo Bay in one year, the path toward achieving this goal has proven to be riddled with obstacles. Now, officials are saying this timetable will likely not be followed, as 220 suspects are still currently detained.
The hardest suspects to address are probably the Yemenis, who account for nearly half of the total number of detainees at Guantánamo.
For example, Alla Ali Bin Ali Ahmed, a man from Yemen, was detained for 7 years without formal charges, and was released just last week after a long-awaited trial. American officials dug their heels in sending him back to Yemen, hoping instead to enroll him in a rehabilitation program in Saudi Arabia in order to curb any terrorist tendencies he might have picked up while in prison.
Officials are worried that even detainees who have been proven not guilty may have been radicalized against Americans while being detained at Guantánamo, and thus might join an insurgency after being released.
This is especially a fear with regard to Yemen, a country with a growing presence of al-Qaeda operatives. And unlike Saudi Arabia, it has no rehabilitation program in place to pacify the suspects once they return home.
Add to this the idea that Yemen is soft on terrorism after the outbreak of 23 suspected terrorists there in 2006, and American officials are becoming increasingly hesitant to dispatch suspects to the country, even after they are classified as “not dangerous.”
What this means for Obama’s promise is becoming increasingly apparent: a little over 300 prisoners have been released from Guantánamo, but over 200 also remain. It’s clear that the closing of the detention center is farther off than Obama promised, especially since 97 of those remaining are Yemenis.
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ReplyDeleteI'm thoroughly skeptical of the whole idea of "rehabilitation program[s]". How is being refused the right to return home and sent to something that can't really escape a distinct stink of brainwashing and propaganda, despite being found innocent, going to "pacify" someone who has been "radicalized against Americans while being detained at Guantanamo"?
ReplyDeletePerhaps I'm missing something, but it seems to me that a straight up "we're sorry. We screwed up. You can have your life back now", preferably directly from the president, is about the best we can do. In an ideal scenario this would be coupled with compensation of some kind, or at least access to educational and mental/emotional support/counseling upon returning home to help them get back on their feet after 7 years in a black box...
It seems to me that this is a ‘don't trust people unless they've proven they can be trusted’ (preferably by being born white, Christian, and American) extension of the ‘guilty until proven innocent’ paradigm which rose to prominence under the Bush presidency and got us into this whole mess in the first place.