The plea deal with the alleged mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks has rekindled questions about the future of Guantanamo Bay, the military prison where the United States has held hundreds of terrorism suspects for more than 22 years.
Previous presidents, including Barack Obama and Joe Biden, have said they wanted to shut down the site, a relic of the never-ending “war on terror” that began shortly after Osama bin Laden launched his infamous attacks on America.
But no president has actually closed the modest 45-acre camp near Cuba’s eastern edge, even though only 30 prisoners remain there, including 9/11 terror plot mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and two others who also made the deal.
“I think it’s mainly a lack of courage and a lack of prioritization,” said Scott Rome, director of policy and advocacy at the National Center for Victims of Torture. He told NPR in January When asked why the Biden administration still hasn’t closed the prison.
“There weren’t enough transfers from Guantanamo. The administration released a few earlier this year, but then transfers stopped,” he said.
“These men should be released after unanimous agreement from all agencies of the United States government with functions critical to national security,” Rome continued. “There is no need to continue to hold them in custody any longer; their detention serves no national security purpose. In most cases, these decisions were made years ago.”
Perhaps the prison’s most famous guests, Mohammed and co-conspirators Waleed Mohammed Saleh Mubarak bin Attash and Mustafa Ahmed Adam al-Hawsawi, had been there since 2003, just a year after the facility opened and two years after U.S. troops and local allies entered Afghanistan in October 2001.
Federal authorities confirmed on Wednesday that they had finally reached a deal with the three terrorists, who would plead guilty to all charges, including the murders of 2,976 people on Sept. 11, 2001, and avoid the death penalty.
A plea-bargain hearing could take place as early as next week, with a sentence set for next summer, according to a letter sent by prosecutors to the victim’s family and obtained by The Washington Post.
Prosecutors said in court Thursday that the defendants hope to plead guilty as soon as next week, but a source familiar with the case said the military judge considered that deadline too ambitious.
Sources said only Mohammed attended the court hearing, while the other two waived their right to be in attendance.
Details of the plea agreement, including where Mohammed and his two co-conspirators will serve their sentences, are unlikely to be made public until the sinister trio is sentenced, which could happen as soon as next summer.
But even as terrorism suspects prepare to learn their fate, the prison’s future remains uncertain.
As part of a provision in the National Defense Authorization Act, the annual law that sets the Defense Department’s funding and policy priorities, Congress prohibited the Defense Department from using funds to “transfer or release” Mohammed or any other Guantanamo detainees.
The provision is set to expire on December 31, but next year’s NDAA will extend it until December 31, 2025.
The bill has already passed the Republican-led House of Representatives and awaits approval from the Senate.
The Trump administration first implemented the funding ban in 2018. It has been extended every year since then.
Despite those obstacles, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said at a press conference Thursday that Biden is “determined to see this through” with closing the facilities.
If that were to happen, it would go further than former President Barack Obama, who vowed during his election campaign to abolish what are essentially secret military prisons where terrorism suspects can be held indefinitely without trial.
“In the dark halls of Abu Ghraib and the detention center at Guantanamo, we put our most cherished values at risk,” he said. According to the New Yorker.
On his second day in office, President Obama issued an executive order declaring the prison, which held as many as 780 Muslim men in cramped, sparsely packed cells, to close by the end of the year.
But that never happened.
In 2015, when an Ohio seventh grader asked him what advice he would give to himself if he could run for president again, Obama replied, “I would have closed Guantanamo on day one,” according to The New Yorker.
But the political situation became tough and “the path of least resistance was to leave it alone,” he added.
The media added that during its many years of operation, Guantanamo has mainly housed low-ranking soldiers in al-Qaida’s war against the United States.
Even some in the Bush administration, which opened the facility on land the U.S. has leased from Cuba since 1903, did not want it to survive.
“It was a burden,” a senior Bush administration official told The New Yorker in 2016. “We really wanted to close it, but we wanted to avoid the political firestorm. A lot of that was down to the Department of Defense, who were opposed to closing it then and still are now.”
Today, the prison is mostly empty: 741 men have been released from the facility known as Guantanamo Bay.
Of the remaining 30 detainees, 11 are facing war crimes charges in the military court system. The New York Times reported.
Three more are being held in indefinite law-of-war detention, and 16 are being held in law-of-war detention but have been recommended for transfer to other countries, it added.
Some of them are from terror hotspots such as Afghanistan, Yemen, Libya and Iraq, and others are nationals of countries generally friendly to the United States, such as Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, who were captured during fighting in the Middle East.
Mohammed was one of them. The man who bragged about planning the 9/11 attacks “from A to Z” was captured in Pakistan in 2003 and then sent to a secret CIA facility where he was tortured, according to The New York Times.
He was transferred to Guantanamo in 2006 and is one of only five defendants sentenced to death in the September 11 terror plot.
The plea deal has led some, including Daphne Aviatar, director of the human rights group Amnesty International USA, to renew calls for the prison to be closed.
On Wednesday, she called on the Biden administration to permanently abandon Guantanamo Bay detention center.
“The Biden administration must take all necessary steps to ensure that a state-sanctioned program of enforced disappearances, torture, and other abuses is never again carried out by the United States,” she said.
With post wire
