A panel was conducted Monday by the IU Center on American and Global Security to discuss the issue of Guantanamo Bay and the obstacles to closing the facility.
Guantanamo Bay is a U.S. military prison located in Cuba on the Guantanamo Bay naval base.
The first day of his first term in office, President Obama promised to close Guantanamo Bay for good. Now, almost seven years later, Guantanamo Bay is still open and currently holding 149 detainees.
Obama instructed his administration in 2008 to look at the cases of the 240 prisoners at Guantanmo and figure out what to do with them, said Carol Rosenberg, a correspondent with the Miami Herald in Florida.
“Someone got scared,” Rosenberg said. “They looked into the files and they realized in the first year that there were people that they never wanted to let go, but that they could never try.”
Former U.S. Rep. Lee Hamilton said the government has no useful evidence to try these prisoners.
“That’s a nice way of saying we tortured a lot of them,” he said.
Four months after 9/11, Rosenberg watched as the first 20 prisoners stepped onto Cuban soil. At its peak after the attacks, 779 people were sent to Guantanamo Bay, Rosenberg said.
Rosenberg, who is the only correspondent who regularly covers Guantanamo, said the problem with moving those 80 people is finding somewhere for them to go.
“I want to remind people that we were taken by surprise on Sept. 11, and suddenly four months later we think we have the worst of the worst there,” she said.
Out of the 149 detainees still at Guantanamo, 36 of them will probably never leave.
“Because I covered this regularly I came to call them the ‘forever prisoners,’” Rosenberg said. “These are the prisoners who can never be charged with a crime, but they chose not to let go.”
The Obama administration was no longer going to close Guantanamo but instead move the trials and the “forever prisoners” to the United States and systematically and securely let everyone else go.
“But closing Guantanamo to the Obama administration didn’t mean closing Guantanamo, it means moving it,” she said.
Leila Sadat is a professor of law at Washington University and the special adviser on crimes against humanity to the International Criminal Court prosecutor. She spoke on her personal views of the issue as seen by other countries.
Sadat spoke of her feelings Nov. 13, 2001, when President George W. Bush signed an executive order that allowed military tribunals against foreign people suspected of connections to terrorist acts on the United States.
“Seeing that order was a shock,” Sadat said. “It was a shock.”
It was the first time such an order was issued since World War II.
“I think it is important to go back to that moment of outrage and see how, with the stroke of a pen, White House lawyers and the President of the United States could put aside the entire post-war legal mission,” Sadat said.
Hamilton, who himself said he thinks Guantanamo should be closed, doesn’t think it will happen anytime soon. The same sentiment was echoed by the entire panel.
He contributed the lack of follow-through by multiple presidents to the lack of consent between Congress and the president.
“There has to be an organized commitment to close Guantanamo,” he said.
