It's Time to Get Rid of Gitmo

Photo Courtesy / U.S. Army 

Guantanamo Bay has stood a monument to controversy, anger and fear for the last 13 years.

Guantanamo Bay began as a radical solution to an unexpected and equally radical problem. Over those 13 years, it has become infamous for torture practices and abuse. It is time to close this ugly chapter in the history of the U.S. and create an alternative to the detention center.

Although the history of Guantanamo Bay goes back to the late 19th century, the decision to detain many Al Qaeda members at Guantanamo Bay came after Sept. 11, 2001, according to TIME.

For a long time, no rules applied to Guantanamo. Nobody knew exactly what happened inside the facility, but no one was asking questions neither. Years later, released prisoners filed complaints of abuse and torture. Turkish citizen Murat Kurnaz was held for five years without official charges filed against him before he was released, according to his book, “Five Years of My Life: An Innocent Man in Guantanamo.”

Countless stories began appearing and circulating, with the biggest and most concrete of them coming from the flurry of documents left in the wake of the WikiLeaks scandal, which was made available to The New York Times as well as other media outlets.

Gradually, more people, organizations and countries have denounced the mere existence of this prison. Even President Barack Obama vowed to close Guantanamo Bay by the end of his term in his 2015 State of the Union address, a claim he first made in his 2008 presidential campaign, according to the National Journal.

So why is Guantanamo Bay still open?

Unfortunately, one reason for the survival of Guantanamo Bay is our country’s inability to take bipartisan action.

Since Obama made Guantanamo’s closing a goal, Republican senators Lindsey Graham and John McCain have wholeheartedly fought against transport proposals and closing the facility in general. The lack of cohesive planning has stalled and derailed the final steps to put the history of Guantanamo’s prison in the past, according to CBS News.

A united Congress shutting down a prison viewed with disgust worldwide would show the American public that our country is heading down the right path, finally putting others before petty political games.

More importantly, whether the people in that facility committed or were planning to commit crimes, they are still people. They are human beings who may assuredly deserve to be incarcerated, but they do not deserve the kinds of tortures Guantanamo Bay is known for.

To make matters worse, these techniques have been known to create false confessions among other inconsistencies.

According to NBC News, Prisoners resort to falsifying stories to end the torture inflicted by their tormentors. Some released prisoners admit to having tried to end interrogations with these tactics on multiple occasions, even if they were innocent.

“Guantanamo Diary,” a memoir by former detainee Mohamedou Ould Slahi, details the practice of sleep deprivation, death threats, beatings and waterboarding to the point that he made up stories like a fictional plot to blow up the CN tower in Toronto. Such practices create misinformation and confusion, undermining the purpose for which Guantanamo Bay was established in the first place.

Lately, conflicts in France and Yemen have once again stirred the fears of the American people.

It is once again beginning to look like the closing of Guantanamo Bay will be postponed, despite increasingly diplomatic relations with Cuba and the president’s speech.

We cannot and should not let that happen. We will always find the time to craft excuses, but now is the time when we as a country need to stop and gather the courage necessary to end the age of Guantanamo Bay and move to an alternative method of imprisoning and interrogating the enemies of peace. We must find a more humane way to ensure the safety of Americans in a way that will invoke pride, rather than shame, in its people.