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george w. bush
Close Guantánamo Permanently to Prevent It Being Used for Further Human Rights Abuses
The mass deportation and detention of asylum-seekers is not only unlawful but cruel—and not a real immigration solution.
Feb 23, 2025
In a deeply disturbing and unprecedented move, the U.S. has begun transferring immigrant detainees to Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. They’re being held without access to their lawyers and families.
President Donald Trump has ordered up to 30,000 “high-priority” migrants to be imprisoned there as part of his larger mass deportation and detention campaign.
Trump claims these migrants are the “worst criminal aliens threatening the American people.” But recent investigations of those detainees have already challenged this narrative. And a large percentage of immigrants arrested in the U.S. have no criminal record.
We should also shut down the “War on Terror” prison at Guantánamo once and for all—and pursue accountability for its decades of abuses. Otherwise, it will only continue to expand.
Unfortunately, this isn’t the first time our government has invoked “national security” to deny marginalized communities their basic human rights. President George W. Bush created the infamous military prison at Guantánamo during the “War on Terror” to hold what his administration called the “worst of the worst.”
The prison has since become synonymous with indefinite detention—15 people still remain there today, over 20 years later. Notorious for its brutality and lawlessness, Guantánamo should be shut down, not expanded.
Of the 780 Muslim men and boys imprisoned there since January 2002, the vast majority have been held without charge or trial. Most were abducted and sold to the U.S. for bounty and “had no relationship whatsoever with the events that took place on 9/11,” reported the United Nation’s independent expert in 2023, who reiterated the global call to close Guantánamo.
The Bush administration designed the prison to circumvent the Constitution and the 1949 Geneva Conventions, refusing to treat the prisoners as either POWs or civilians. This legal fiction resulted in a range of human rights violations, including torture.
But the Constitution—and international law—still applies wherever the U.S. government operates. All prisoners, including immigrants, are still entitled to humane treatment, legal counsel, and due process.
“Never before have people been taken from U.S. soil and sent to Guantánamo, and then denied access to lawyers and the outside world,” said Lee Gelernt, the lead attorney in the ACLU case challenging Trump’s executive order.
However, the U.S. does have a sordid history of detaining migrants captured elsewhere at the base. As legal scholar Jeffrey S. Kahn points out, the U.S. has detained Haitians at Guantánamo on and off since the 1970s.
In the 1990s, thousands of Haitian refugees fleeing persecution following a military coup were captured at sea. The U.S. held them in horrific conditions at Guantánamo so they couldn’t reach U.S. shores to seek asylum—which is a fundamental human right long enshrined under U.S. law.
Shrouded in secrecy, the U.S. continues to capture and detain asylum-seekers fleeing Haiti, Cuba, and other Caribbean countries at Guantánamo. Last fall, the International Refugee Assistance Project reported that refugee families are kept in a dilapidated building with mold and sewage problems, suffer from a lack of medical care, and are “detained indefinitely in prison-like conditions without access to the outside world.”
Trump’s order would take these abuses to a horrifying new level.
Currently, the base’s existing immigration detention facility can hold up 120 people. Expanding it to 30,000 will require enormous resources. The “War on Terror” prison at Guantánamo already costs an estimated $540 million annually, making it one of the most expensive prisons in the world.
Then there are the moral costs.
The mass deportation and detention of asylum-seekers is not only unlawful but cruel—and not a real immigration solution. Instead, our government should prioritize meaningful immigration reform that recognizes the dignity of all people.
We should also shut down the “War on Terror” prison at Guantánamo once and for all—and pursue accountability for its decades of abuses. Otherwise, it will only continue to expand. “I can attest to the facility’s capacity for cruelty,” warned Mansoor Adayfi, who was subjected to torture and endured nearly 15 years at the prison.
Guantánamo’s legacy of injustice must end.
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Welcome to Gtitmo! The Freest Place on Earth! (From Human Rights Law)
Trump’s intention to expand the Gitmo prison is symbolic as well as practical: It revitalizes the Bush-era war on terror; it brings the war home.
Feb 14, 2025
Gitmo, of course!! It’s the freest place “we” have—by which I mean the American government, aka President Donald Trump. No rules apply there, be they international humanitarian law or the U.S. Constitution. It’s a dumping ground, a black hole.
It’s the most secure place for America to hold, as Trump put it a few weeks ago, “the worst criminal illegal aliens threatening the American people. Some of them are so bad we don’t even trust their countries to hold them because we don’t want them coming back.”
His plan is to expand the infamous Guantánamo Bay Detention Center, part of the U.S. naval base in Cuba, which George W, Bush began using as he waged his horrific “war on terror” in the Middle East. He began imprisoning alleged terrorists, often arbitrarily arrested, in a hellhole where they had zero rights. Some are still there, several decades later. Trump’s plan is to expand the detention center to hold 30,000 people, which would be, oh, more than double the size of two unforgettable Nazi concentration camps combined: Dachau and Treblinka.
What’s different about the Trump plan, according to PolifiFact, quoted at Al Jazeera, is that the U.S. has never sent people who were detained in the United States to Guantánamo.
And these migrants would be stuck there entirely under the control of an American government that has declared them to be the country’s biggest enemy of the moment: the biggest threat to our national safety. No rights for them!
If you want to be a great national leader, this is step one: Create an enemy. Stir fear and hatred, then demonstrate that only you can protect us, by doing what’s necessary: dehumanize, dehumanize, dehumanize. That is to say, keep things simple: us vs. them. This is what the masses understand, apparently.
Oh God, I don’t believe this at all, but the reality of it seems unshakable—with Trump in the White House, more so than ever. There was a time when I believed we were moving beyond the militaristic simplism of Superpower America, with political hope bubbling all the way up to former U.S. President Barack Obama’s election in 2008. Yeah, the Bush era’s dead! But then... wars continued, not much changed. Obama had promised to close the Gitmo prison in his first year. That didn’t happen—and that’s when I started to realize that the progressive movement in this country had no real political traction.
What we have instead is ongoing outrage, fueled by truth and introspection. Trump wants to “make America great again” and keeps ironically raging about the migrant invasion. The days of American greatness for which he’s reaching go well past the civil rights (the “political correctness”) era, past the women’s rights era, past the Great Depression. America’s greatness began with the European invasion of what came to be called the Americas—several hundred years of obliterating native cultures and dehumanizing them as “savages.” Our “greatness” preceded the American Revolution and continued well after it.
Trump’s intention to expand the Gitmo prison is symbolic as well as practical: It revitalizes the Bush-era war on terror; it brings the war home. Today’s terrorist equivalents are the migrant invaders. If you’re interested in reclaiming the actual history of that period, I recommend the bookWitnesses of the Unseen: Seven Years in Guantánamo, written by two Algerian men randomly arrested in Bosnia in 2001: Lakhdar Boumediene and Mustafa Ait Idir. They were falsely accused of being terrorists and spent seven years imprisoned for no reason at Gitmo—pulled away from their wives, their children... witnessing, and enduring, horrendous treatment, trapped in the American black hole with zero rights. The book contains fragments of our national history: what we can do in the wake of creating and dehumanizing an enemy.
Some years ago, I wrote about the book, about the hell they endured: “stuffed into cages, interrogated endlessly and pointlessly, humiliated, force-fed (in Lakhdar’s case)... and finally, finally, ordered by a U.S. judge to be freed, when their case was at long last heard in a real court and the lack of evidence against them became appallingly clear.” This happened thanks to the unending aid they received from a U.S. law firm that spent more than 35,000 pro bono hours litigating the case.
“The book is the story of the courage it takes to survive.”
As well as alleged terrorists, Gitmo has also long been used to detain immigrants intercepted at sea. At Gitmo, they lacked “access to basic human necessities, appropriate medical care, education, and potable water,” according to the International Refugee Assistance Project. And they had no option to seek asylum in the U.S.
What’s different about the Trump plan, according to PolifiFact, quoted at Al Jazeera, is that the U.S. has never sent people who were detained in the United States to Guantánamo. Those arrested here actually had certain rights and protections—which could essentially disappear at Gitmo. Somehow that seems like the point of it all: Americans first. Americans only!
Progressive sanity will re-emerge politically, or so I believe, but how this will happen is anything but clear. The Republican right has certain serious political advantages, even if their basic agenda has only minority support. The prime advantage is billionaire dollars backing their cause. And, of course, creating an “us vs. them” governing mentality has a lot more immediate impact than addressing the world—even one’s enemies—with empathy, understanding, and a sense of connection.
Another difficulty the progressive movement faces is the Democrats, who have drifted ever more centrist-right since the Reagan era, refusing to challenge the Republican agenda head-on and gently cradling the nation’s expanding militarism.
It almost seems like we need to start over: Rosa Parks must refuse to give up her seat on the bus again. What might this mean? If nothing else, the truth about American history must continue to flow and efforts to ban it from libraries and classrooms, to burn it in book fires, must be endlessly challenged. And truth still speaks to us from the mountaintop:
“So even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream. I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.”
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No, Biden Wasn’t Unable to Stop the Gaza War—He Was in on It
The truth of the matter is that every day for the past year, Biden could have secured a cease-fire by using America’s vast leverage, and every day for the past year, from all the evidence we have today, Biden chose not to.
Jan 17, 2025
There is little doubt that President-elect Donald Trump’s posture vis-a-vis Israel is a key reason why a cease-fire in Gaza has finally been achieved. According to a diplomat briefed on the matter, this was “the first time there has been real pressure on the Israeli side to accept a deal.”
This means that for 15 months, Israel has dropped American bombs on children in tents, on refugees sheltering in schools, and on patients seeking help in hospitalswithout President Joe Biden exerting any “real pressure” on Israel to stop.
And once the mere posture of pressure was exerted on Israel by an envoy representing a man who isn’t even president yet, lo and behold, a cease-fire was secured.
By willingly making America complicit, Biden’s decisions will have profound and long-lasting strategic repercussions for the American people on par with the damage George W. Bush’s illegal invasion of Iraq inflicted on America’s standing, credibility, and security, as well as on the region’s stability.
All these senseless deaths, all the American credibility lost, all the Biden voters who stayed home in protest on November 5 could have been avoided.
The truth of the matter is that every day for the past year, Biden could have secured a cease-fire by using America’s vast leverage.
And every day for the past year, from all the evidence we have today, Biden chose not to.
That is the crux of the matter. It is precisely the fact that Biden chose this path that will damage America for years to come. It wasn’t that he lacked the ability or strength to stop the carnage. It’s not that he really wanted to stop it but sadly couldn’t. It wasn’t that his hands were tied. It wasn’t that Congress forced him. Or that polls showed that he or Kamala Harris would lose the elections if they pressed Israel. It wasn’t any of that.
Biden was simply in on it. He was on board with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s war plans. He even attended the war cabinet where the plans were adopted.
In an exit interview with The Times of Israel, Biden’s outgoing ambassador to Israel even bragged about the Biden administration never exerting pressure on Netanyahu to halt the killing. “Nothing that we ever said was, Just stop the war,” Ambassador Jack Lew proudly declared.
By willingly making America complicit, Biden’s decisions will have profound and long-lasting strategic repercussions for the American people on par with the damage George W. Bush’s illegal invasion of Iraq inflicted on America’s standing, credibility, and security, as well as on the region’s stability.
Biden’s own acting Director of the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC), Brett Holmgren, told CBS that "anti-American sentiment fueled by the war in Gaza is at a level not seen since the Iraq war." Terrorist groups such as al Qaeda and ISIS are recruiting on these sentiments and issuing the most specific calls for America in years, according to Holmgren.
So every bomb Biden provided Israel to drop on children in Gaza was not only morally monstrous; it also made Americans less safe.
It will take years for America to recuperate from the damage Biden has inflicted on our standing, our moral compass, our credibility, and on our security. America is still recovering from the sins of the Iraq invasion.
But there will be no healing at all, no bouncing back, unless we admit the errors, hold those responsible accountable, and learn to do better. Just as Bush’s Iraq invasion and Global War on Terror gave birth to the strongest anti-war sentiments among Americans seen in decades, made war-mongering bad politics, and the epithet “neocon” an insult, Biden’s bearhug strategy on and blind deference to Israel must forever be remembered as the original sin that led America down the path of complicity in what most likely amounts to genocide.
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