{"id":478152,"date":"2022-01-20T20:47:41","date_gmt":"2022-01-20T20:47:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/fair.org\/?p=9025883"},"modified":"2022-01-20T20:47:41","modified_gmt":"2022-01-20T20:47:41","slug":"its-20-years-of-detention-and-it-needs-to-end","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/2022\/01\/20\/its-20-years-of-detention-and-it-needs-to-end\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018It\u2019s 20 Years of Detention and It Needs to End\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><i>Janine Jackson interviewed the Center for Constitutional Rights&#8217; Pardiss Kebriaei about <\/i><em>Guant\u00e1namo prisoners<\/em><i> for the <a href=\"https:\/\/fair.org\/home\/pardiss-kebriaei-on-guantanamo-prisoners\/\">January 14, 2022, episode<\/a> of <\/i><b><i>CounterSpin<\/i><\/b><i>. This is a lightly edited transcript.<\/i><\/p>\n<div id=\"mp3jWrap_0\" class=\"mjp-s-wrapper s-graphic unsel-mjp  verdana-mjp\" style=\"font-size:14px;\"><span id=\"playpause_wrap_mp3j_0\" class=\"wrap_inline_mp3j\" style=\"font-weight:700;\"><span class=\"gfxbutton_mp3j play-mjp\" id=\"playpause_mp3j_0\" style=\"font-size:14px;\">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<\/span>&nbsp;<span class=\"group_wrap\"><span class=\"bars_mp3j\"><span class=\"loadB_mp3j\" id=\"load_mp3j_0\"><\/span><span class=\"posbarB_mp3j\" id=\"posbar_mp3j_0\"><\/span><\/span><span class=\"T_mp3j\" id=\"T_mp3j_0\" style=\"font-size:14px;\">CounterSpin220114Kebriaei.mp3<\/span><span class=\"indi_mp3j\" style=\"font-size:9.8px;\" id=\"statusMI_0\"><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/div><span class=\"s-nosolution\" id=\"mp3j_nosolution_0\" style=\"display:none;\"><\/span><script>\nMP3jPLAYLISTS.inline_0 = [\n\t{ name: \"CounterSpin220114Kebriaei.mp3\", formats: [\"mp3\"], mp3: \"aHR0cHM6Ly9tZWRpYS5ibHVicnJ5LmNvbS9jb3VudGVyc3Bpbi9jb250ZW50LmJsdWJycnkuY29tL2NvdW50ZXJzcGluL0NvdW50ZXJTcGluMjIwMTE0S2VicmlhZWkubXAz\", counterpart:\"\", artist: \"\", image: \"\", imgurl: \"\" }\n];\n<\/script>\n\n<script>MP3jPLAYERS[0] = { list: MP3jPLAYLISTS.inline_0, tr:0, type:'single', lstate:'', loop:false, play_txt:'&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;', pause_txt:'&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;', pp_title:'', autoplay:false, download:false, vol:80, height:'' };<\/script>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<div id=\"attachment_9025886\" style=\"width: 360px\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\"><img aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-9025886\" loading=\"lazy\" class=\" wp-image-9025886\" src=\"https:\/\/fair.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/01\/Buffalo-News-AP-History.png\" alt=\"Buffalo News image of plane over Guantanamo Bay\" width=\"350\" height=\"284\" srcset=\"https:\/\/fair.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/01\/Buffalo-News-AP-History.png 855w, https:\/\/fair.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/01\/Buffalo-News-AP-History-300x243.png 300w, https:\/\/fair.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/01\/Buffalo-News-AP-History-768x622.png 768w, https:\/\/fair.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/01\/Buffalo-News-AP-History-640x519.png 640w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 350px) 100vw, 350px\" \/><p id=\"caption-attachment-9025886\" class=\"wp-caption-text\"><em><strong>AP<\/strong> via <strong>Buffalo News<\/strong> (<a href=\"https:\/\/buffalonews.com\/news\/archives\/today-in-history-jan-10\/collection_64a02eec-7a2e-5141-8d31-2413543fe645.html#8\">1\/10\/22<\/a>)<\/em><\/p><\/div>\n<p><b>Janine Jackson: <\/b>On January 10, <b>Associated Press<\/b>\u2019 &#8220;Today in History&#8221; feature highlighted January 10, 2002, when, it said, \u201cMarines began flying hundreds of Al Qaeda prisoners in Afghanistan to a US base in Guant\u00e1namo Bay, Cuba.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Twenty years on from the opening of that monument to the lawlessness and cruelty and racism of the US after September 11, 2001, and media are still shorthanding Guant\u00e1namo detainees as Al Qaeda prisoners.<\/p>\n<p>A bigger problem is US news media\u2019s erratic attention to the continued operation of a military prison specifically designed to be beyond the reach of US law, holding only Muslim men and boys, most of whom were never charged with anything, much less convicted.<\/p>\n<p>Even after the official end of the war on Afghanistan, the sense one gets of Guant\u00e1namo from the press is that it\u2019s lamentable, yet somehow unchangeable. Outrageous, yet somehow acceptable.<\/p>\n<p>Keeping it out of the US public sight and mind was part of government\u2019s plan for Guant\u00e1namo. Some people have been resisting that effort along with defending detainees\u2019 rights for many years now, including our guest. Pardiss Kebriaei is senior staff attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights and a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. She joins us now by phone. Welcome back to <b>CounterSpin<\/b>, Pardiss Kebriaei.<\/p>\n<p><b>Pardiss Kebriaei: <\/b>Thank you so much, Janine.<\/p>\n<p><b>JJ: <\/b>Around January 11, the official 20-year mark, people may have seen headlines that a US government review panel has approved the release of five men from Guant\u00e1namo. That sounds like motion, like movement. Many people, I think, may not understand the tremendous, maybe unbridgeable, gulf between &#8220;approved for release&#8221; and leaving Guant\u00e1namo.<\/p>\n<p><b>PK:<\/b> It is a very good thing that those men have been cleared. They should have been cleared, or probably could have been cleared, years ago. But under the Trump administration, for four years, there was just very little movement of any kind on Guant\u00e1namo. So things are finally picking up again this year under the Biden administration.<\/p>\n<p>But yes, there\u2019s a very big distance between being approved for transfer, which means basically that every government agency with a stake in these detentions has looked at its case files on these men, heard from them, and determined that their detention is not necessary. That\u2019s significant, obviously. But there have been men who were cleared for release years ago under the Obama administration who are still sitting in Guant\u00e1namo.<\/p>\n<p>So yeah, the work right now is to transfer those men out, for the government to find countries for them to be sent to, either send them home&#8211;and in some cases they can be sent home&#8211;or to find third resettlement countries for them, and then to continue this process, which is underway, of approving for transfer the men who remain.<\/p>\n<p>At this point, 20 years on from 9\/11, those processes shouldn\u2019t really be necessary. A certain number of detainees at Guant\u00e1namo, the majority, who have never been charged and will never be charged by the government: The government has had 20 years to determine whether it\u2019s going to bring charges against them, and it has not. So more than half of the men at Guant\u00e1namo are in that category. Administrative review processes really at this point should not be necessary for the government to decide, to determine, that continuing detention into year 21, 22 and on is not necessary. But that is the process it\u2019s undertaking, and it just needs to continue it and finish it, and begin the work of transferring men out now. It is, as you said, and as I\u2019ve said, 20 years, two decades, of detention, and it needs to end.<\/p>\n<p><b>JJ: <\/b>Just for clarity, these men have to be transferred to other countries. It seems to me, if you just think about it, people who\u2019ve been held without charge for decades now have been declared not to be a threat; why are we still in charge of where they live afterwards? What are these rules that govern where they can go, and why can\u2019t they come to the US?<\/p>\n<p><b>PK: <\/b>By law, there\u2019s a ban on transferring them to certain countries, and certainly to bringing them to the United States for any reason, even for prosecution. So there are legal obstacles that the United States Congress has erected to where they can go.<\/p>\n<p>But despite those obstacles&#8211;I mean, those have existed for a long time, and transfers have happened by the dozens before; today we\u2019re talking about a very small number of people who remain at Guant\u00e1namo. It\u2019s actually, for as many ways as we can lament the fact that it still exists, I\u2019ve been reflecting on how remarkable it actually is where we are, which is from a population of nearly 800 in the early 2000s, in the early years of the prison, to 39 men today.<\/p>\n<p>That\u2019s remarkable, and that\u2019s the work of pressure, the work of organizers, journalists, advocates, lawyers, the men themselves, really, in surviving this long. I mean, it\u2019s not the usual trajectory for prisons to empty, and it has.<\/p>\n<p>So today we\u2019re talking about a very small number of people. And, again, nearly half of whom have been approved for transfer by the United States itself. So this is not at this point insurmountable work. It can be done. Third countries need to be found in many cases, or people can just be repatriated. But that\u2019s work that has happened before, and can happen again. Today I think it\u2019s just a matter of, as usual, a bit of politics and will, and whether and how to make this a real priority for the Biden administration, admittedly in the middle of a lot of crisis.<\/p>\n<p><b>JJ: <\/b>Right.<\/p>\n<p><b>PK: <\/b>Right, I mean, there is context here, and I think everyone understands that. But that can\u2019t continue to delay the work of finally shutting the prison down. It can be done, and it needs to happen. Twenty years is enough. It\u2019s been enough for a long time.<\/p>\n<p><b>JJ: <\/b>Is there a real disagreement? Because we see some finger-pointing that Congress is what\u2019s holding it up, that if Biden would just act, something could happen. What is behind the inertia, or who really does have the power? Does it require a multipart effort?<\/p>\n<p><b>PK: <\/b>No, it really doesn\u2019t, I think. This is work that can reside in the Biden administration. It\u2019s largely the work of quickly continuing to approve people for transfer, if that\u2019s the process the administration feels it needs to undertake. Although lawyers have said for a long time that at this point, 20 years on, for the men the government has never charged and has no intention of charging, it really needs no further process.<\/p>\n<p><b>JJ: <\/b>Right.<\/p>\n<div id=\"attachment_8406747\" style=\"width: 360px\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\"><img aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-8406747\" loading=\"lazy\" class=\" wp-image-8406747\" src=\"https:\/\/fair.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/01\/Pardiss-Kebriaei-Portrait.jpg\" alt=\"Pardiss Kebriaei (image: Witness to Guantanamo)\" width=\"350\" height=\"437\" srcset=\"https:\/\/fair.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/01\/Pardiss-Kebriaei-Portrait.jpg 444w, https:\/\/fair.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/01\/Pardiss-Kebriaei-Portrait-240x300.jpg 240w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 350px) 100vw, 350px\" \/><p id=\"caption-attachment-8406747\" class=\"wp-caption-text\"><em>Pardiss Kebriaei: &#8220;There\u2019s wide acknowledgement and understanding that now is the time to finally finish the work of closing the prison.&#8221; (image: <\/em><a href=\"https:\/\/witnesstoguantanamo.com\/videos\/after-release-the-u-s-washes-its-hands\/\"><em>Witness to Guant\u00e1namo<\/em><\/a><em>)<\/em><\/p><\/div>\n<p><b>PK: <\/b>It sort of speaks for itself that they remain uncharged and in this category for 20 years. But anyway, for the government to complete its review process, if that\u2019s what it\u2019s doing, and to find third countries, or to repatriate the people that it is clearing, that\u2019s work that can happen by the administration, by the State Department.<\/p>\n<p>I think the reason it has not, frankly, is a matter of getting their bearings internally and a lot of crisis and chaos that I think the Biden administration inherited. But I think there\u2019s wide acknowledgement and understanding that now is the time to finally finish the work of closing the prison, and that it can be done; it\u2019s just a matter of doing it.<\/p>\n<p>And there are right now 18 men who are sitting in Guant\u00e1namo, have been there for decades, and are approved for transfer, third countries can be found for those men, need to be found for those men. There are countries the government sent people to by the dozens under the Obama administration. There were dozens of people sent to Oman, to Saudi Arabia, to other countries in the past, and the same can be done. It doesn\u2019t necessarily have to be a matter of finding individual placements for every single person.<\/p>\n<p>That said, I think that one lesson of transfers in the past is that real care needs to be taken, also, with where people are resettled and the conditions in which they land and the support they have. These are people who have been treated brutally in all the ways that we know and have been documented, and need real support in order to recover, I don\u2019t know, but just to reintegrate. So care needs to be taken.<\/p>\n<p>But it can be done. The government has transferred dozens of people to countries before, and the same can be done now. So it\u2019s really just work that can largely reside in the administration, in the Biden administration, and it\u2019s just a matter of doing it now.<\/p>\n<p><b>JJ: <\/b>We may, if that action is taken, we\u2019ll be hearing at some point about the lesson, about what we learned from Guant\u00e1namo, about what it meant. And I think many listeners, particularly younger listeners, may not have a real sense of the unprecedented nature, and just the science fiction-y nature, of Guant\u00e1namo. So if we could just return, briefly, to that first principle, the fact that it was put not on US soil, not just to kind of keep reporters from being too inclined to investigate it&#8211;the hurdles for journalists have always been high&#8211;but there was an idea that if the US was holding foreigners outside of the US, that US courts couldn\u2019t do anything about it. When we talk about this aura of lawlessness, that was built-in and intentional.<\/p>\n<p><b>PK: <\/b>That\u2019s right. It is true that there have been a lot of things about Guant\u00e1namo that are particular: the remote nature of it, the really overt way that in the beginning the Bush administration denied people any even theoretical rights, the really overt kinds of torture that happened and were talked about in terms of methods. So there are certainly things that were very overt and brutal and particular to Guant\u00e1namo and, at the same time, I think anyone who has been exposed to or in or touched the criminal legal system in the United States, or prison in the United States, knows torture is not unique to Guant\u00e1namo, prolonged detention is not unique to Guant\u00e1namo, the lack of due process is not unique to Guant\u00e1namo.<\/p>\n<p>And so I\u2019ve sort of resisted&#8211;and a lot of us doing this work, advocates, lawyers alike, have resisted&#8211;this notion that Guant\u00e1namo is exceptional. I think what has made it exceptional is the way that all these things that we do in the United States, by the thousands and the millions and historically, came together in this particular way, in this particular prison and in this particular time against this group of people.<\/p>\n<p>So I like to say it is very particular, but not exceptional. And that doesn\u2019t take away at all from the brutality of what people have been through, and the harm of it, and that it is as wrong and depraved at Guant\u00e1namo as it is in prisons in the United States. And I think that\u2019s not a new idea. I think there have been a lot of us organizers and advocates, like I was saying, who understand that now, and who have the broader context for the way that we treat and punish people we deem to be threats in some form.<\/p>\n<p>But we can hold both, to say that it isn\u2019t exceptional <i>and <\/i>\u00a0it\u2019s depraved and it needs to end and it matters. It doesn\u2019t matter more than the imprisonment of a client I have in the United States who\u2019s serving a life without parole sentence in Pennsylvania State Prison. But it matters as well. It\u2019s <em>and<\/em>, not <em>but<\/em>.<\/p>\n<p><b>JJ: <\/b>Yeah. And finally, as with the deeper problems with the criminal legal system in this country, it seems sometimes to be missed in reporting that Guant\u00e1namo harmed and harms not only the people trapped there, but the system within it operates, the rule of law. If those things aren\u2019t jokes to us, then this is a concern for everyone, and not simply a story about some hundreds of unfortunate men.<\/p>\n<div id=\"attachment_9025887\" style=\"width: 210px\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\"><img aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-9025887\" loading=\"lazy\" class=\"size-full wp-image-9025887\" src=\"https:\/\/fair.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/01\/Sharqawi-Al-Hajj.jpg\" alt=\"Sharqawi Al Hajj\" width=\"200\" height=\"262\" \/><p id=\"caption-attachment-9025887\" class=\"wp-caption-text\"><em>Sharqawi Al Hajj<\/em><\/p><\/div>\n<p><b>PK: <\/b>Absolutely. And I\u2019ve reflected on this more recently, just the circles of harm. And it harms us in terms of law and democracy and human rights and all of that, and I don\u2019t mean to sort of be dismissive about those things; those matter. But on a human level, there are circles of harm around this prison, as there are around every prison in America.<\/p>\n<p>I think about the men that I have met and represent, a man who\u2019s still there 20 years on, his name is Sharqawi Al Hajj, he\u2019s 47 and he\u2019s from Yemen. We could talk about the particular cruelty of his experience in Guant\u00e1namo today, not knowing, still not knowing, whether and when he might be released, or if he\u2019s going to die there. So there\u2019s something, like I said, very particular about the indefinite nature of detention.<\/p>\n<p>But it\u2019s not just him. It\u2019s his family, it\u2019s that circle of people. It\u2019s people at Guant\u00e1namo, the staff, the guards who\u2019ve had to guard the prison, and the medical staff who\u2019ve had to follow orders to force-feed hunger-striking detainees, and advocates who have traveled down to the base for years and had to sit across from people who\u2019ve suffered torture. There are reverberations of all these things and, so yes, it\u2019s more than just the individual inside. There\u2019s a whole world of people on the outside who are affected, and carry the pain and trauma of Guant\u00e1namo, and that\u2019s part of why it\u2019s so important to remove these sites from the landscape.<\/p>\n<p><b>JJ: <\/b>We\u2019ve been speaking with Pardiss Kebriaei, a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study and senior staff attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights. You can follow their work online at <a href=\"https:\/\/ccrjustice.org\/\">CCRJustice.org<\/a>. Pardiss Kebriaei, thank you so much for joining us this week on <b>CounterSpin<\/b>.<\/p>\n<p><b>PK: <\/b>Thank you so much for having me, Janine.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>The post <a rel=\"nofollow\" href=\"https:\/\/fair.org\/home\/its-20-years-of-detention-and-it-needs-to-end\/\">&#8216;It&#8217;s 20 Years of Detention and It Needs to End&#8217;<\/a> appeared first on <a rel=\"nofollow\" href=\"https:\/\/fair.org\/\">FAIR<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n<p class=\"syndicated-attribution\">This post was originally published on <a href=\"https:\/\/fair.org\/home\/its-20-years-of-detention-and-it-needs-to-end\/\">FAIR<\/a>. <\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>&#8220;There\u2019s wide acknowledgement and understanding that now is the time to finally finish the work of closing the prison.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>The post <a rel=\"nofollow\" href=\"https:\/\/fair.org\/home\/its-20-years-of-detention-and-it-needs-to-end\/\">\u2018It\u2019s 20 Years of Detention and It Needs to End\u2019<\/a> appeared first on <a rel=\"nofollow\" href=\"https:\/\/fair.org\/\">FAIR<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1415,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[259,1103,6,260,262,263],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/478152"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1415"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=478152"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/478152\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":489161,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/478152\/revisions\/489161"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=478152"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=478152"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=478152"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}