Tuesday, January 13, 2009

The Closing of Guantanamo Bay


As the inauguration of President Elect Obama draws nearer and nearer, the problems he is facing just keep accumulating. Cleaning up after the least popular American President in modern history is proving itself to be quite an impossible task.
Even early on in the campaigning days, the Obama team had always said that one of the first Executive Orders that Barack Obama will give if ever elected President was to shut down Guantanamo Bay, a terrorist detention center in a US Base in Cuba. Now that the day has come, the Obama Cabinet seems to be keeping its promise and are now in the early stages of organizing a Guantanamo bay shutdown. Guantanamo Bay has always been a hot topic for discussion because it has been a place in which the US has been detaining 250 alleged Al Qaeda members and terrorism suspects, without giving them a proper trial date or proper sentencing. Now, many people have asked how this is possible, how do you detain all these people with giving them due process and court sentencing?
Well, the answer lies in the fact that Guantanamo Bay (as mentioned earlier) is actually not located on US Soil. Located in the Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, The Guantánamo Bay Detention Camp has been in service since 2001 and has been used to detain 'enemy combatants' almost illegally. With many calls coming from the international community as to why the detainees are not being presented with the laws that they are entitled to in the Geneva Convention, Guantanamo Bay continues to be a center for an ongoing heated international debate.
And now while many people are thankful that the Obama cabinet is finally going to shut this allegedly modern day Abu Ghraib down, a large amounts of skepticism over the task seem to be emerging and it is obvious that the problems being faced will be causing a major headache to anyone in charge of this task.
What options do the US have when shutting down Guantanamo Bay? What exactly will they do with the 250 detainees that they are currently holding?
In my opinion these are the following options.
A. Let the prisoners go and try and regulate their actions in methods other than detention. (A task that will have the CIA working in overtime).
B. Try and give all of them a proper court date and trial on American soil (but I highly doubt this, seeing how the US Judicial System is already backed up as it is, and the trials will also be highly biased seeing how the detainees are seen by most Americans as enemies of the country)
or finally C. Shipping the detainees over to our allies in other countries and letting these other nations decide if they want to give them a fair trial, or continue their unlawful detention.
Whatever the outcome of this situation, it is going to be quite a struggle and I look forward to how the Obama Cabinet is going to deal with this task.

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