Guantanamo bay

Day 28 / 365

After the 9 / 11 terrorist attacks, the US government launched The War on Terror. They wanted to track down the people behind the attacks, and to get some leads they offered huge sums of money to anyone in the countries like Afghanistan and Pakistan who turn in any suspects.

This led to the creation of “black sites,” secret prisons outside of the bounds of the law where prisoners were not charged with crimes and were denied fair trials. One of these prisons was the Guantanamo Bay detention camp, which held over 700 individuals, many of whom were innocent Uighur men fleeing persecution in China.

The detention camp was based on a US military site in Cuba, and since it was outside the US, no US laws applied there. The prisoners were interrogated and tortured, but they were never given a fair trial, nor were they able to contest their detention.

You would think that international laws would still apply there, and many countries and even the UN pressured the US to treat the prisoners as Prisoners of War and abide by the Geneva Convention. To get past this, the US refused to label the detainees as Prisoners of War and came up with a new term for them — “Unlawful Enemy Combatants”

Human Rights activists started holding protests in the US, demanding they close down the camp and the Supreme Court stepped in. Eventually, 500 detainees were sent back to Afghanistan and President Obama announced plans to close the Guantanamo Bay detention camp within a year.

The remaining detainees were divided into three groups: those who were transferred, those who were tried in court, and those who were moved to a high-security prison within the US. However, transfers became complicated as some detainees’ home countries were in conflict and other countries were not ready to take them in.

After Obama’s term, 41 detainees were still held at Guantanamo Bay. President Trump wanted to keep the prison open and in his four years in office, only one detainee was released. President Biden has approved the transfer of an additional five detainees. Despite the efforts of President Obama and President Biden, the Guantanamo Bay detention camp remains a contentious issue, with many Congress Senators (from both political parties) continuing to protest its existence.