At a time when the Senate is refusing to even consider a Supreme Court nominee, President Obama is pressing forward with another plan that faces roadblocks in Congress: closing the military detention centre at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
Obama’s proposal to shutter the facility, announced last week, is a timely reminder of the grave issues at stake in 2016. Guantanamo is a monument to the worst abuses the George W. Bush administration committed in the name of safety and the “war on terror.” Its continued existence beyond the boundaries of the law makes a mockery of American values and weakens our standing in the world. “This is about closing a chapter in our history,” Obama said. “It reflects the lessons that we’ve learned since 9/11 — lessons that need to guide our nation moving forward.”
Leading Republicans, however, answered the president’s call with a predictable chorus of condemnation. The party’s obstructionist in chief, Sen. Mitch McConnell (Ky.), warned that Guantanamo’s closure would result in “bringing dangerous terrorists to facilities in U.S. communities.” Likely presidential nominee Donald Trump responded with typical bluster, promising to keep the prison open and “load it up with some bad dudes.”
At the same time, some civil liberties advocates voiced frustration with Obama’s latest effort. In a statement, the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), a longtime supporter of closing Guantanamo, bluntly stated: “President Obama’s proposed plan is too little, too late.” CCR also argues that the centrepiece of the plan, moving detainees who have not been charged and never will be charged with any crime to a U.S. prison, does not “close Guantanamo”; it merely relocates it to a new Zip code. “The infamy of Guantanamo has never been just its location, but rather its immoral and illegal regime of indefinite detention.”
The president should be commended for reviving the issue of Guantanamo, which has loomed over his presidency since he vowed to shut it down during his first week in office. But it’s also important to recognise, as CCR and other civil liberties and human rights groups remind us, that the protracted battle over Guantanamo’s fate has always been about more than the prison itself. It’s also about the use of torture.
In September 2002, The Post reported on the “secret CIA interrogation center” at Bagram air base in Afghanistan, where detainees were sometimes “subject to what are known as ‘stress and duress’ techniques.” In March 2003, the Wall Street Journal interviewed an unnamed U.S. intelligence official who revealed that interrogators at Bagram and Guantanamo Bay were authorised to use “a little bit of smacky-face” when questioning terror suspects, explaining, “Some al Qaeda just need some extra encouragement.”
But the CIA, we now know, did much worse. Interrogators employed a variety of brutal torture techniques, including waterboarding, sleep deprivation, mock executions and rectal rehydration. To justify its torture program, the CIA lied to Congress about its effectiveness. And when the Senate Intelligence Committee, then led by Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), long considered “one of the CIA’s most faithful supporters,” threatened to expose the truth in a comprehensive report, the agency obstructed the release of the committee’s findings and even spied on staffers’ computers.
The committee’s full 6,000-page report remains classified. But the executive summary, released in December 2014, stated its top finding in no uncertain terms: “The CIA’s use of its enhanced interrogation techniques was not an effective means of acquiring intelligence or gaining cooperation from detainees.” The report’s gruesome details were also a sobering reminder that, in addition to being ineffective, torture is an immoral affront to our core values.
More than a year after the report’s findings were released, the United States has failed to grapple with its grave implications. Today, copies of the full report “sit untouched in vaults across Washington.” The Intelligence Committee is now chaired by Richard Burr (R-N.C.), who called the report “a footnote in history.” Rivals for the Republican nomination seek to out-tough one another by signaling their intention to bring torture back. “If we capture any of these ISIS killers alive,” Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) has said, “they are going to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and we’re going to find out everything they know.” More explicitly, Trump has boasted that he “would absolutely authorise something beyond waterboarding,” while insisting — wrongly — that “torture works.”
And as in the lead-up to the Iraq War, much of the media has contributed to the deception by failing to tell the American people the truth. Despite conclusive evidence that we tortured, journalists still rely on euphemistic phrases such as “enhanced interrogation techniques.” Despite conclusive evidence that torture did not work, torture apologists such as Dick Cheney still receive airtime. And despite conclusive evidence of the CIA’s stonewalling and subversion, criticism of the agency — such as Sen. Bernie Sanders’s (I-Vt.) decades-old statement that it is “a dangerous institution” — is still treated as ridiculous.
In 2009, Obama justified his decision not to prosecute those responsible for torture during the Bush administration by saying that “we need to look forward as opposed to looking backwards.” Closing Guantanamo is a moral imperative, but in order to close the ugly chapter it represents, it’s time for the United States to take a cold-eyed look at our recent past. The Obama administration should release the full Intelligence Committee report and appoint a special prosecutor to investigate the torture program. Congress should outlaw CIA prisons and ban the practice of indefinite detention without trial. And the media should recognise once and for all that torture is not a matter of serious debate: It is a war crime.
A version of this article appeared in Washington Post on March 1, 2016