WASHINGTON: President Joe Biden’s administration has launched a formal review of the US military prison at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, reviving the Obama-era goal of closing the controversial facility before he leaves office.
Aides involved in internal discussions are considering an executive action to be signed by Biden in coming weeks or months, sources told an international news agency. When asked whether Biden would shut the high-security prison located at the Guantanamo Naval Station by the time his presidency ends, White House spokeswoman Jen Psaki told reporters: “That certainly is our goal and our intention.”
Set up to house foreign suspects following September 11, 2001, attacks on New York and Washington, the prison came to symbolize the excesses of the US war on terror because of harsh interrogation methods that critics say amounted to torture.
“We are undertaking an NSC process to assess the current state of play that the Biden administration has inherited from the previous administration, in line with our broader goal of closing Guantanamo,” National Security Council spokeswoman Emily Horne told an international news agency.
“The NSC will work closely with the Departments of Defense, State, and Justice to make progress toward closing the GTMO facility, and also in close consultation with Congress,” she added.
The immediate impact of a new approach could be to reinstate Obama’s Guantanamo closure policy which was reversed by Donald Trump as soon as he took office in 2017. Trump kept the prison open during his four years in the White House.
There are forty prisoners remaining mostly held for nearly two decades without being charged or tried. Biden’s campaign said during the 2020 race that he continued to support closing the detention center but did not say how he would do it.
Opened under President George W. Bush, the prison’s population grew to a peak of about 800 inmates before it started to shrink. Obama whittled down the number further but his effort to close the prison was impacted largely by Republican opposition in Congress.
The federal government is still barred by law from transferring any inmates to prisons on the US mainland. A revived Guantanamo strategy is expected to focus initially on further decreasing the number of prisoners by repatriating them or finding other countries to accept them.
This could also mean re-establishing a State Department post of Guantanamo closure envoy, created by Obama but eliminated by Trump, to resume negotiations with other governments on detainee transfers. The Pentagon could restart a parole-style review process of prisoners’ cases to determine whether they still posed a threat.
The Biden administration has not made Guantanamo one of its top early priorities as it grapples with the pandemic and its economic fallout. Obama made closing Guantanamo one of his first executive orders in 2009 but failed to do so by the end of his second term.
Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin’s statement during his January confirmation hearing that the new administration would seek Guantanamo’s closure drew a letter of rebuke signed by seven Republican House members.
Of the prisoners who remain, nine have been charged or convicted by military commissions. The most notorious is Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the accused mastermind of 9/11 attacks. About two dozen have not been charged but have been deemed too dangerous to release. Six inmates have previously been cleared for release by a government panel, yet remain jailed with no arrangements for transfer.
