In a statement issued on February 2nd, Scott Roehm, Washington director at the Center for Victims of Torture noted that Joe Biden has long backed closing down the Guantanamo Bay prison --which former President Barack Obama, under whom Biden was vice president, promised but failed to do during his eight years in office.
"If the president is determined to close the prison, he can, and in relatively short order," Roehm said. "Unless and until he does, Guantanamo's corrosive impact -- both literally and for what it represents-- will continue to deepen and spread."
As 'PBS News Hour' noted last month, Biden Defense Secretary Gen. Lloyd Austin also said "he would follow through on President Obama's efforts to close Guantanamo Bay."
For over 19 years, the U.S. has drawn global condemnation for mistreating Gitmo prisoners who have been tortured and held without trial. After prosecutors filed charges against three longtime detainees last month, Amnesty International reiterated its demands demands that Biden end military commissions and close down the facility.
The human rights group's U.S. arm was among the 111 groups that signed on to the new letter to Biden, which declares that "it is long past time for both a sea change in the United States' approach to national and human security, and a meaningful reckoning with the full scope of damage that the 9/11 approach has caused."
"Closing Guantanamo and ending indefinite detention of those held there is a necessary step towards those ends." the letter continues. "We urge you to act without delay, and in a just manner that considers the harm done to the men who have been imprisoned without charge or fair trials for nearly 20 years."
The letter details parts of the prison' widely denounced history:
Among a broad range of human rights violations perpetrated against predominantly Muslim communities, Guantanamo -- designed specifically to evade legal constraints, and where Bush administration officials incubated torture -- is the iconic example of the post-9/11 abandonment of the rule of law. Nearly 800 Muslim men and boys were held at Guantanamo after 2002, all but a handful without charge or trial. Forty remain, at the astronomical cost of $540 million per year, making Guantanamo the most expensive prison in the world.
Guantanamo embodies the fact that, for nearly two decades following the September 11, 2001 attacks, the United States government has viewed communities of color -- citizens and non-citizens alike -- through a security threat lens, to devastating consequences. This is not a problem of the past. Guantanamo continues to cause escalating and profound damage to the men who still languish there, and the approach it exemplifies continues to fuel and justify bigotry, stereotyping, and stigma. Guantanamo entrenches racial divisions and racism more broadly, and risks facilitating additional rights violations.
Biden's predecessor, former President Donald Trump, vowed as a candidate that he would keep Gitmo open and "load it up with some bad dudes."
Trump also "proposed sending undocumented immigrants to Guantanamo to be held as 'enemy combatants,' " the letter notes. "He further built upon the discriminatory animus, policies, and practices that Guantanamo represents through his odious Muslim Ban, each iteration of which was explicitly promulgated under the false pretense of protecting the nation from terrorism. And the Trump administration's militarized federal response to protests against the extrajudicial killings of George Floyd and other Black people was fueled by the war-based post-9/11 security architecture and mindset that Guantanamo epitomizes."
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