Today, Explained - Why is Guantanamo still open?

Episode Date: September 27, 2021

A former Defense Department adviser says President Biden might succeed where President Obama failed, and the man formerly known as “Detainee 441” speaks. Today’s show was produced by Haleema Shah, edited by Matt Collette, engineered by Efim Shapiro, fact-checked by Laura Bullard, and hosted by Sean Rameswaram. Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained. Support Today, Explained by making a financial contribution to Vox! bit.ly/givepodcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Get groceries delivered across the GTA from Real Canadian Superstore with PC Express. Shop online for super prices and super savings. Try it today and get up to $75 in PC Optimum Points. Visit Superstore.ca to get started. On the show last week, we covered a new crisis on the southern border of the United States. Thousands of Haitians were living in squalor under a bridge outside Del Rio, Texas. The Biden administration had begun deporting them to Haiti. But there were also rumors that the Biden administration wanted to send some of them to Guantanamo,

the naval base that houses the notorious prison site on the coast of Cuba has had a less notorious migrant detention center in the past. Can you definitively clarify whether or not the administration will send migrants at the border to Guantanamo? We will not. There's never been a plan to do that. The White House denied that was ever in the cards. I think there was some confusion related to the Migrant Operations Center, which has been used for decades to process migrants interdicted at sea for third country resettlement.

The brief attention on Guantanamo was a reminder that despite the war on terror winding down in Afghanistan, the war on terror's detention center in Guantanamo Bay is still very much open and active. It's almost 20 years old. President Obama tried and failed to shut it down, and now President Biden wants to try again. On the show today, we're going to look at the challenges he faces and hear from a former Guantanamo detainee. But first, Jasmine El-Gamal. I'm a senior manager for MENA at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue and a former Middle East advisor at the Department of Defense. I was also a translator at Guantanamo

Bay. We asked Jasmine to remind us why Guantanamo Bay's detention center was opened in the first place. I would say the biggest argument was centered around the use of this term global war on terror. Our war on terror begins with al-Qaeda, but it does not end there. It will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped, and defeated. There were a lot of terms that came into play around that time as the Bush administration tried to legally justify sending these people to Guantanamo Bay. I mean, this was something that really

was unprecedented at the time. We went into Afghanistan and we were fighting an enemy. And this is really important to understand in terms of why we were calling them enemy combatants versus prisoners. These are enemy combatants who are waging war on our nation. We have a right under the laws of war. And we have an obligation to the American people to detain these enemies and stop them from rejoining the battle. We were fighting an enemy that wasn't wearing a traditional uniform and that wasn't part of a traditional army. And so the Bush administration used that as an excuse or as justification to not treat them as prisoners of war and afford them the rights that they would have been afforded

under the Geneva Conventions had they been part of a conventional army. All of us in the administration are united in the view that they are not deserving of prisoner of war status. There is a question that we are examining and it is a difficult question and that is the legal application of the Geneva Convention. This is a new kind of conflict, it's a new world, but at the same time we want to make sure everybody understands that we are a nation of law abiding by our

international obligations. So the whole, you know, a big part of the reasoning and the justification for bringing them to Gitmo and treating them as enemy combatants was because the Bush administration said this is a new type of war, this is a new type of enemy, the enemy doesn't make itself known to us and therefore we should not have to treat them as if they were a traditional army and a traditional foe. And certainly this had opposition from the jump it had opposition but you know for people who who weren't really following it at the time i think

it's it's important to kind of highlight in hindsight it's really easy to see how you know horrible this was and and and and just how wrong it. Not to say that we didn't know at the time that it was wrong. I mean, obviously, it was clear from the start. But in terms of the legal justifications and the legal kind of hoops that were being jumped, I think a lot of people didn't really understand what was happening until years later. The Bush administration kind of, I would say, used the fact that people were shell-shocked after September 11th. People were afraid. Remember, these are the ones in Guantanamo Bay are killers. They don't share the same values we share. They would like nothing more than to come after America or our friends and allies.

And so therefore, it's in our national interest to make sure we know enough about them before we decide what to do with them. A lot of people didn't want these enemies, you know, this faceless enemy that didn't wear a uniform, that wasn't part of a traditional army. They didn't want them anywhere near the United States. There was a lot of fear at the time, a lot of confusion as to what we were dealing with. And I think the Bush administration and their legal team really utilized that fear and that uncertainty to create justifications for bringing them to Gitmo. Do we know to date how many people have been detained at Guantanamo Bay? The New York Times reports that since 2002, about 780 detainees have been held at one point or the other in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, at the detention center.

And about 39 remain today. So who ends up there? I mean, who ended up there? I mean, everybody. You know, in the fog of war, sort of, you know, U.S. forces are in Afghanistan. They're fighting the Taliban. They know that al-Qaeda is there. There are a lot of bad guys there. We're rounding people up and we're literally holding tribunals on the spot, trying to determine whether they should be put on a plane and sent to Gitmo, there was a sense that if you were an Arab in Afghanistan in 2001, 2002, 2003, that you were a bad guy. When the U.S. went

into Afghanistan, for example, we put a bounty on the head of Arabs living in Afghanistan. So we basically said, we will pay you X number of dollars if you turn in an Arab fighter. You can imagine the number of people that were turned in wrongly, either by a neighbor who held a grudge against them and just wanted to collect some cash by giving them to the Americans. But, Sean, remember that a lot of these Arabs actually went to Afghanistan in the 80s to fight the Soviet Union. And the U.S. supported them at the time.

After the Soviet Union left Afghanistan in defeat, a lot of these fighters just stayed. They got married. They built families. I mean, they built a whole life over there. And we didn't really take that into account when we were looking for, you know, for Arabs in Afghanistan, let alone the Afghans who are living there that we determined should be part of the detainee population in Guantanamo Bay. So you can imagine how many people were just caught up in that and ended up being there for years and years for no reason whatsoever. Just to give people an idea, Jasmine, of what your experience may have been like if you had been wrongly detained at Guantanamo in, say, I don't know, 2002, 2003. How long did it take you to become aware of why you were even there and then after that to potentially be released? I mean, short answer, a very, very long time. It took at least, at least a couple of years between the time that the first detainees were brought to Guantanamo Bay to the time when they were actually provided with a piece of paper that had a list of the reasons why they were there. And they were called allegations, the list of allegations. So we

think that you did X, Y, and Z. Would you like to respond to these allegations? So you're saying that you might be detained in a tiny cell, beaten and tortured for multiple years before anyone even tells you why? Pretty much. Pretty much you could be. The reality is that they will be treated humanely in accordance with the precepts of the convention because that's the kind of people we are. We treat people well. We treat people humanely. And you can be sure that's what is happening with the detainees at Guantanamo

and all others who are in the custody of the United States Armed Forces or other parts of the United States government. Picture the first detainees arriving in 2002, early 2003, summer of 2004. The review boards start. It takes, you know, a few months. Sometimes it takes more than a year for the detainees to agree to participate, you know, because remember, these were not legal proceedings. These proceedings were not recognized by any court of law. So a lot of the detainees would refuse to participate in them because they're like, we're not going to give this proceeding any legitimacy because we should not

even be here. And so if you can imagine that if you were there completely wrongly detained and some review board was set up to try to give you a chance to explain your story, but you're afraid that your words may be used against you, you know, you're afraid that you might not be able to offer evidence for your story. I mean, it was so, so complicated that it took at least a few years for it to become clear whether a detainee should be released or not. In his first week in office, President Obama said he was going to shut it down. This first executive order that we are signing by the authority vested in me as president... You were an assistant to the undersecretary of defense at the time Obama was trying to shut down Guantanamo. What happened?

And promptly to close the detention facility at Guantanamo consistent with the national security and foreign policy interests of the United States and the interests of justice, I hereby order. President Obama had made it very clear from day one that he was going to shut it down for a whole host of reasons, not just because it was a legal embarrassment and a legal travesty, but also it was one of the top issues that was being used and is still used today in terrorist recruitment efforts. Terrorists and extremists will use Guantanamo Bay as a way to recruit people into their movements. It's counterproductive to our fight against terrorists because they use it as propaganda in their efforts to recruit. I mean,

you remember the photos from the early, early days of Guantanamo, of men in orange jumpsuits kneeling down, hands handcuffed behind their backs, barbed wire, dogs, torture, waterboarding. I mean, all of that stuff was happening completely outside of the realm of any legal justification whatsoever. Of course, it's prime recruitment material. And so why was it so hard for the Obama administration to shut it down? So there are two types of people, right, at Guantanamo Bay, the people that we eventually decided to release, and the people that, you know, for example, like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who's actually a really bad guy, and we know that, and he's one of the people who's being tried for the September

11th attacks. There were challenges with both of those categories. The people that we wanted to release, first of all, we would try to release them to their home country, their country of origin. In some cases, though, they hadn't lived in that country of origin for years and years. And so that country wouldn't want them back. So let's say Saudi Arabia, for example, or Jordan or whatever country, they were like, wait a minute, this person has not even lived here. We don't know what they've been up to. They've been in Gitmo. So it becomes sort of a stigma that they carry around. So that was one challenge we had. Sometimes their home countries didn't want them. When we would try to send them to third countries,

sometimes the third countries wouldn't want them. They'd be like, wait a minute, why are you trying to send these people to, oh, we have nothing to do with this. In a lot of cases also, we wouldn't even take them. Even though the U.S. was responsible for bringing them to Guantanamo, we knew that they were wrongfully detained.

We recommended them for release. We still couldn't bring them to the U.S. because of political considerations and outcry from people here. Do we have to release them in the United States? If we can't find a third country, what do we do with them? So many challenges. And that's just with the people who we wanted to release. With the other category, like the people who we wanted to try. Last November, Holder announced 9-11 mastermind suspect Khalid Sheikh Mohammed would be tried

in federal criminal court in New York City. There was a huge outcry when President Obama even suggested that they would be flown to the U.S., either to be held in maximum security prisons here or to be put on trial here. New York Democrat Chuck Schumer asked him to look elsewhere. The overwhelming consensus in New York, as you know, is that it shouldn't be there. And I just strongly urge you to make sure that that doesn't happen. It was very difficult to convince members of Congress, U.S. taxpayers, that they should pay to fly these people who attacked our country into the country so that they could have a platform or somehow use that as a victory lap in some kind of way.

Republicans, like Senator Sessions, said Guantanamo suspects should not be tried anywhere on the U.S. mainland. American people are not interested in terrorists being brought from Guantanamo to their own communities. Reality is a stubborn thing. Pretending that terrorists can safely be treated as common criminals will not make it so. When I worked in the Obama administration, President Obama appointed two special envoys, one at the State Department and one at the Defense Department. Their sole job was to figure out how to release people from Guantanamo Bay. So reviewing their case files, making recommendations for release that the Secretary of Defense had to sign off on.

There were regular meetings, if I remember correctly, and there were huge diplomatic efforts with other countries to try to convince those other countries to take them. So Gitmo has now been open under four presidents. So obviously it's not just a challenge for one president. I just signed, prior to walking in, an order directing Secretary Mattis, who is doing a great job. And in fact, President Trump actually, just before his first State of the Union address,

signed an executive order to keep Guantanamo Bay open indefinitely. To re-examine our military detention policy and to keep open the detention facilities in Guantanamo Bay. Twelve years later, does Obama's vice president now have a better chance to shut it down? He has a better chance only because we're getting closer and closer to the trial dates, or to a start date at least least for some of these trials, although they're not happening anytime soon. But you could imagine that over the next four years or eight years, we're able to hold these trials and to hold people accountable. But then the question, Sean, becomes, well, if these trials are held and okay, let's say, for example,

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is found guilty in a court of law. Well, where do you put him? So there is also a chance that you just end up keeping a portion of that prison open, of that detention facility open, if only to hold the few people that we could find guilty in an actual court of law. But the U.S. needed a place to put Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. And as you said, no states were willing. Does that mean perhaps not Guantanamo, but something like it was necessary at some point in this war on terror? I mean, I would never say that something like Guantanamo Bay was necessary. President Bush could have brought four people to the Guantanamo Bay naval base that was already there, and that would have been the challenge that we would have had to deal with.

Instead, he decided to bring hundreds and hundreds of people, just sweeping them off the streets of Afghanistan, and bringing them and creating this legal and moral and strategic mess that he did that subsequent presidents had to clean up, basically. I mean, it didn't have to be this way. To answer your question, right, I don't know if we needed a place like Guantanamo Bay, but I certainly know that we didn't need it to be what it was. After the break, Detainee 441. Support for Today Explained comes from Ramp. Ramp is the corporate card and spend management software designed to help you save time and put money back in your pocket.

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concerns about your gambling or someone close to you, please contact Connex Ontario at 1-866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. I had never spoken to someone who had been detained at Guantanamo Bay until I spoke to Mansour Addaifi. I didn't know what to expect, but I did not quite expect this. Hey guys! Mansour was bubbly. Good morning or good afternoon, good whatever, at your place, at your time. I am Mansour Addaifi. He was wearing an orange scarf the same color as the orange jumpsuits detainees at Guantanamo wear.

I have other names like 441, my intimate Syrian number at Guantanamo. Smiley Troublemaker, the worst of the worst. WOW. I got those names at Guantanamo. I asked him who he was before he became detainee 441, smiley troublemaker, or the worst of the worst. Effervescent. very conservative and tribal society. We live by tribal code, honor, integrity, courage, hospitality, and so on. Mansour says that he was a bright kid, so he eventually left his village to continue his schooling in Sana'a, Yemen. When I started my high school, I moved to live with my aunt at the city. What was a new world? A lot of cars, buildings, streets, lights.

Whoa! This is a new world, guys. So from there, I finished my high school. I learned a lot about the city, about life, about the new world. Around this time, Mansour says he gets a gig as a researcher. Then I went to Afghanistan on a research mission. I was like researcher assistant. What were you researching in Afghanistan?

We were researching for one of the Islamic institutes about those groups in Afghanistan, Al-Qaeda, Taliban, and new other groups. You know, they believe the ideology and so on. And my work was approved by Yemeni government, official work. What were you trying to find out? There was many groups there. Nobody knows about them. And there's a lot of information. There was no kind of like internet

or like now social media, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, whatever. You know, someone has to travel to get there, to get materials, to talk to the people, to interview them and so on. I was the only assistant to that work. And when were you there? I was there in 2001, I think in July. Yeah.

Don't talk much about it because my lawyers are like, don't talk much about your time in Afghanistan. I said, okay. I have someone who is like also watching me all the time, my lawyers. Are your lawyers in the room right now? No. Okay, then tell me about your time in Afghanistan. No, I can't because they told me not to go in details about it because still they told me just not to go there so much.

I guess what I'm really trying to understand here, Mansour, is how did you end up at Guantanamo? One day I was in the restaurant, then we heard in the Arabic channel that there was like an airplane that flew into buildings in the United States. We didn't pay much attention to it, honestly. When I was in Afghanistan, my mission of research, I was directed to work with a charity organization who was our sponsor there. They get instructions from Saudi Arabia they should liquidate everything and leave the country. So from that point, I went to one of the friends who work in that charity,

and we had to distribute everything. There was medical stuff, medicine, blankets, and he said, we need to take this to the city, to the hospital, because they need immediate assistance. I said, okay. We took the charity organization car, while driving to that place where Ombosh was on the road. I was kidnapped by the world lord, insulted by the CIA, by the world lord as a general. Then I was moved to the black side, one of the worst places on earth.

You'll be lucky if you came out alive. Then I was moved to another detention in Qandahar. Then from there I was shipped to Guantanamo. I was packed in orange. The shoes was orange, the uniform was orange, everything was orange. But they put something around my neck, a sign which says, beat me. I got beaten from Qandahar until I arrived at Guantanamo. How long were you in Guantanamo before you figured out why you were there?

At the first, I was accused to be al-Qaeda general or an Nile insider then by 2015 they said no unclear if he actually joined Al-Qaeda because they said none of Al-Qaeda members or Al-Qaeda leaders recognize him as a member of Al-Qaeda I said guys either you say Al-Qaeda or he's not Al-Qaeda I don't know why I was there. And I used to torture the interrogators after 2012. I used to be like, who are you? The new interrogator would come. What's your name? I said, Osama Bin Laden Al-Qaeda General Al-Narif Insider.

Come on, monster, don't say that. I said, why? You guys kicked my fucking ass for the last, like, for seven years, eight years to say this stuff. Someone once asked me how did you spend your 20s i said what i don't know what you're talking about i never lived my 20s time froze at that place imagine you were sent to a place totally disconnected from the world, from your life, from your families, from everything. You are being kept in a cement box or cage, being treated, tortured, experimented on, punished for practicing your religion. This is Guantanamo. And when you look, if you just now Google, Guantanamo, America's battle lab.

Google what? Guantanamo? Guantanamo, America's battle lab. Guantanamo, America's Battle Lab. Did you find it? I got it. When General Jeffrey Miller arrived at Guantanamo by the end of 2002, and by the way, General Jeffrey Miller, before he went to Iraq and tortured detainees in Abu Ghareeb and Boka prisons, he was at Guantanamo. That way he started developing what they call enhanced interrogation technique. Who was there when you were in Guantanamo? Who else was there? What kinds of people did you meet? All kinds of people. You have students, teachers, journalists, doctors, paramedics, artists, singers, football players, bodybuilders, you know, poets, all kind

of people. There were some people from Taliban. They admitted they were with the Al-Qaeda, like Al-Qaeda propagandists, some of the Latin bodyguards. You were there for 14 years. You know, you didn't experience your 20s. Did you ever think you would get out? Yes. We have a strong faith. I remember one of the interrogators, he used to treat me all the time. You're going to rot here, you're going to... I told him, I swear by Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala, I will leave here, whether I like it or not. As a Muslim, my faith already sealed by Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala, and I think no one can control that.

When I met my lawyer in 2015, I told her, it is my time, I know I will leave soon. What is your life like now that you've been released, Mansur? They forced me to leave to a place which I didn't want to go. They forced me to leave to Serbia. They told me either leave or rot in here. My life, in short words, my life in Guantanamo 2.0. As you see, as I told you,

we're being treated like terrorists. Many of us, some of us still in jail, like United Arab Emirates, people who were resettled in Emirates, they are still in jail for the last five, six years. In other countries, some of the brothers were sent to their own home countries where they're being tortured and imprisoned again. We live in the stigma of Guantanamo. But although

those difficulties and unfortunate situation, I managed to finish my college this year and my thesis is about rehabilitation and reintegration of former Guantanamo detainees into social life and the labor market and we published my book, Don't Forget Us Here. I haven't met my family. And I'm trying to live to a place where I can build my family, start a life, get married, and have two little lovely girls. So, yeah. Before this interview, Mansour, you sent us a song that was written by a detainee. Why did you send us that?

You know, it's a beautiful song and we call it Guantanamo song. It's written by a former Guantanamo detainee. It is very emotional and it's beautiful If you're going to complain about your sadness, just complain to Allah Almighty. That's it. So, no hate, no garage, nothing. This is one of the things that help us to survive Guantanamo. في رضاك في رضاك كل آلام السجون كل ما فيها يهون في رضاك في رضاك Mansoor Addaifi is the author of Don't Forget Us Here. It's about his 14 years as detainee 441 at Guantanamo. Our episode today was produced by Halima Shah.

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