On Tuesday, Barack Obama gave his first detailed response to the prisonwide hunger strike that has been raging at Guantánamo for 12 weeks, responding to a question posed at a news conference by CBS News correspondent Bill Plante. He asked, “As you’re probably aware, there’s a growing hunger strike at Guantánamo Bay among prisoners. Is it any surprise really that they would prefer death rather than have no end in sight to their confinement?”
The question, presumably, was allowed because the president had decided that he could no longer avoid discussing the hunger strike that, at any moment, could result in the death of one of the many men starving themselves to focus the world’s attention on their plight. According to the government, 100 of the remaining 166 prisoners are on a hunger strike, although the prisoners say the true number is 130.
Precipitated by the deployment of a new and aggressive guard force at Guantánamo who manhandled the prisoners’ Korans during searches of the cells that were of unusual intensity, the hunger strike began on February 6 and rapidly became a focal point for the prisoners’ despair at having been abandoned by all three branches of the U.S. government and by the mainstream media.
Although 86 of the remaining prisoners were cleared for release from Guantánamo by an interagency task force that Obama established when he took office in January 2009 (when he promised to close Guantánamo within a year), they are still held because of obstructions raised by the president himself and by Congress.
Two-thirds of the cleared prisoners are Yemenis, but the president issued a ban on the release of Yemenis from Guantánamo after a failed bomb plot on a Detroit-bound plane on Christmas Day 2009, undertaken by a Nigerian man who was recruited in Yemen. That disgraceful decision was followed by Congress’s imposing severe restrictions on the release of any prisoners, requiring that the secretary of Defense certify that anyone to be released will be unable to engage in anti-American activities. That is a certification that appears to be impossible to make, unless freed men are to be immediately and permanently imprisoned on their return home — or are to be resettled in a third country.
On Tuesday, however, when confronted with his failures, Obama chose to sidestep them, blaming Congress instead. He did, however, deliver an eloquent analysis of why the prison at Guantánamo Bay is such an abomination.
Specifically, he said, “I think it is critical for us to understand that Guantánamo is not necessary to keep America safe. It is expensive. It is inefficient. It hurts us in terms of our international standing. It lessens cooperation with our allies on counterterrorism efforts. It is a recruitment tool for extremists. It needs to be closed.”
He also decried “the notion that we’re going to continue to keep over a hundred individuals in a no-man’s land, in perpetuity, even when we’ve wound down the war in Iraq, we’re winding down the war in Afghanistan, we’re having success defeating al-Qaeda core [and] when we’ve transferred detention authority in Afghanistan.” He further criticized “the idea that we would still [detain] forever a group of individuals who have not been tried.” That, he said, “is contrary to who we are, it is contrary to our interests, and it needs to stop.”
