Soon after January 20, 2009 -- the happy occasion of Inauguration Day –Barack Obama will begin to close Guantánamo Bay, fulfilling one of his campaign promises.
It will be a grand day for justice, for the prisoners held there, and for the reputation of the United States. In the 200 years since George Washington was sworn in, perhaps no president has had so catastrophic an impact on global perceptions of the United States as the George W. Bush. Yet the joy with which we bid Bush farewell must be tempered by the reality that he has bequeathed us.
President Obama will encounter a tangled thicket of problems, each one championed by its own special interest group. Guantánamo will be one of the easier to resolve. Roughly 250 prisoners remain there. Of these, some 40 will be brought to the US for a real trial of sorts; 160 will be sent home with expedition. The remaining 50 stateless refugees must be resettled, and we must hope that countries that resisted helping Bush out of his self-painted corner will offer asylum when Obama comes calling.
But Guantánamo has always been a diversionary tactic in the ‘War on Terror’ – despite its secretive qualities, it is the public face of the Bush ‘Secret Prisons’ programme. The men there constitute fewer than one percent of some 27,000 ghost prisoners held by the US beyond the rule of law.
To my knowledge, only two of those other thousands have ever been allowed to see a lawyer. They are being held under worse conditions than their Guantánamo counterparts, many in Iraq, others in Afghanistan, and others in far flung prisons in Bosnia, Diego Garcia, Djibouti, Ethiopia, and Kosovo, as well as US proxy prisons in Egypt, Jordan and Morocco. Few seem aware of their plight; still fewer seem to care.
What will become of this secret renditions programme? First, will anyone even admit it happened? There is already pressure on Obama not to dredge up all the terrible things that happened under the Bush Adminstration. The apologists argue that the pictures of Abu Ghraib served only to breed more violence. Indeed, the US crimes were shocking and did inflame the world. However, until the truth is exposed, it is unlikely that we, or those who succeed us, will learn the lessons necessary to avoid a repetition of this dark period in US history.
The second, self-interested motivation for silence comes from the perpetrators of these wrongs. The CIA is unlikely to lead the charge for revelations, since its agents are those most likely to face indictment for the patent illegalities they committed in the name of the “War on Terror”.
And there is a third reason to think that this process of rendition may not simply melt away with Bush. He was not its progenitor. That distinction went to Ronald Reagan in 1987, but Democrat Bill Clinton joined the party in 1993. Obama will inherit plenty of US sponsored violence around the world, with prisoners taken every day. What is happening to them? What will be done in the future?
Presidential policies are often only as well-formed as the facts that a president receives. Obama’s information about those we deem ‘terrorist captives’ will come from those who capture them – the Pentagon and the CIA, who have a vested interest in portraying them as dangerous jihadists, no matter what the true facts may be.
So hundreds, if not thousands, of prisoners will remain divorced from their legal rights. As Guantánamo Bay closes, a swell of well-intentioned – and justified – goodwill towards the new president will release the pressure to resolve this darker legacy. As economic stimulus packages monopolize the front pages, let us hope these prisoners are not wholly forgotten.
This article also appeared in the New Statesman.
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