Handcuffed and dressed in jail-issue tracksuits, a small batch of prisoners wait in line to be marched on to a transport plane and flown off to a new home that holds a uniquely notorious place in the annals of US justice.
The ten prisoners, all members of Tren de Aragua, a violent Venezuelan criminal gang that has managed to infiltrate America, are about to board the very first flight of ‘criminal aliens’, which departed for Guantanamo Bay last week.
More than 20 years after the world saw the first shocking pictures of suspected Islamic terrorists being held at the same US naval base – kneeling in shackles and wearing orange jumpsuits, face masks, goggles and headphones to block their vision and hearing – the Trump government has horrified its critics by co-opting ‘Gitmo’, as it’s often called, as the latest weapon in its battle against illegal immigration.
‘President Donald Trump has been very clear: Guantanamo Bay will hold the worst of the worst. That starts today,’ said Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, referring to the Venezuelans.
Trump has announced that the Cuban base will be a holding centre for 30,000 immigrants – the ‘worst criminal aliens’ and people who are ‘hard to deport’.
Armed soldiers prepare for the first flight of foreign criminals to Guantanamo Bay this month
Some of the detainees being watched over by American forces on the tarmac at the airport
The president ‘is not messing around and he’s no longer going to allow America to be a dumping ground for illegal criminals from nations all over this world’, said his press secretary.
Some will be bound for a small detention centre at the base, which is currently used to house migrants picked up from the Caribbean Sea heading for the US, while many more will be housed in tents that hundreds of soldiers and marines are already erecting.
However, Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth says dangerous deportees may yet be put in the prison, which still holds 15 terror suspects, who include the alleged mastermind of 9/11, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.
While Hegseth insisted they would only be kept there temporarily, Trump seems to be suggesting something different – something closer to the bleak fate of Guantanamo’s other prisoners.
‘Some of them are so bad that we don’t even trust the countries to hold them because we don’t want them coming back, so we’re gonna send them out to Guantanamo,’ Trump said in January. That doesn’t sound very temporary. Meanwhile, Kristi Noem wouldn’t rule out women and children being sent there.
Civil liberties campaigners have accused Trump of encouraging Americans to associate migrants with terrorism – a charge that hasn’t moved the president.
Indeed, the Trump administration hopes that the prospect of a lengthy spell at the base – described by critics as a ‘legal black hole’ in which Washington could torture, abuse and indefinitely detain prisoners with impunity – will put off future criminals from entering the country illegally.
The same logic of deterrence sat behind the UK’s doomed Rwanda scheme to deport small-boat migrants to the East African country to process their asylum applications. Now shelved by the Labour government, the scheme had many critics.
Even Rwanda and its war-ravaged past, however, will struggle to compete for notoriety with Gitmo. Trump inherits a toxic and hugely expensive regime at Guantanamo, which successive US presidents (although not him) have vowed – and failed – to close.
Its wretched inmates include four so-called ‘forever prisoners’, whom, the US says it can never release as they’re too dangerous. Yet neither can they be put on trial as they’ll reveal details about the CIA’s torture programme, including the identities of officers – thereby endangering them.
Military police at Guantanamo escort a detainee to his cell following the terror attacks in 2001
The military prison in Cuba has a notoriously tough regime
The most notorious of these is Abu Zubaydah, a Saudi-born Palestinian who, from 2002, was used as the guinea pig for the CIA’s torture programme, once being waterboarded 83 times in a month. The US government long ago accepted that Zubaydah was not, as it initially believed, a top al-Qaeda leader, and may have known nothing about the 9/11 plans, although it still insists he was a terrorist.
Other inmates have been stuck for years in legal limbo as lawyers considering their cases argue over the central question of whether military commissions can allow torture in the pursuit of justice.
Trump has warned migrants that Gitmo is a ‘a tough place to get out of’. That’s hardly surprising given that the 15 who remain are guarded in an extensive security operation that involves 800 soldiers and civilians, and – as of 2019 – cost the US $440 million a year.
That would work out now as $36million (£29million) per prisoner, and experts say that figure probably doesn’t even take account of extra costs that are classified. Even Nazi chief Rudolf Hess reportedly cost only $1.5 million a year to guard when he was the only prisoner left in Berlin’s Spandau Prison during the 1980s.
George W. Bush ordered the Gitmo facility to be built in January 2002 on the small naval base to hold terrorism suspects and ‘illegal enemy combatants’ following the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Centre and Pentagon.
Donald Trump with South Dakota governor Kristi Noem during the presidential campaign
Despite Communist Cuba having always been an implacable opponent of the US, the site was leased to America indefinitely for a peppercorn rent in 1903. (The government in Havana opposes the lease and has surrounded the base with a minefield so all supplies must come by air or sea).
By 2003, it was home to nearly 700 prisoners, all of them suspected members or associates of al-Qaeda and their Taliban allies. The Bush administration craftily maintained that it was not obliged to grant the Gitmo prisoners basic protections under the US Constitution or the Geneva Conventions, since the former did not extend to foreign soil and the latter did not apply to ‘unlawful enemy combatants’.
And so the detainees could be held indefinitely without charge and prevented from legally challenging their detention. What justice the prisoners can expect comes from a military commission entirely composed of US servicemen – a system British law lord Lord Steyn dismissed as a ‘kangaroo court’ and a ‘monstrous failure of justice’.
Hence the claims that it is a ‘legal black hole’ – a place where the prevention of another terrorist attack overrides the normal standards of US government behaviour.
Those lapsed standards notably included subjecting suspects to what the US government called ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’ but which critics called torture.
Although the most notorious example is waterboarding, or simulated drowning, others involved sleep deprivation and exposure to extreme temperatures, endless bright lights and loud music.
In 2022, marking the 20th anniversary of the facility opening, UN experts condemned it as a site of ‘unparalleled notoriety’ and said its continued operation was a ‘stain on the US Government’s commitment to the rule of law’.
So why won’t presidents close it as Barack Obama, Joe Biden and even George W Bush wanted to do? The obstruction is Congress, which continues to ban the transfer of Gitmo prisoners to US soil.
Nor can detainees be sent to other countries unless the US is certain they can keep watch on them.
In January, President Biden released 11 Yemeni prisoners – including two former bodyguards of Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden – to restart their lives in Oman, a regional ally of the US.
Who is left? They range in age from 45 to 63 and come from Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Indonesia, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Somalia and Yemen. One is a stateless Rohingya, a Muslim minority in Myanmar, while the other, Zubaydah, is Palestinian.
All but three of them were previously held overseas in secret ‘black site’ prisons run by the CIA, where they were subjected to torture or ‘enhanced interrogation’ and kept incommunicado during years of isolation.
The longest-serving Gitmo prisoner, Ali Hamza al-Bahlul, who was brought to the base from Afghanistan the day the prison opened (four months after the September 11 attacks), is now serving a life sentence there for being Osama bin Laden’s media assistant, making his propaganda videos. The last UK resident, Saudi Shaker Aamer, was released in 2015 after being held there 13 years without charge.
Trump pledged to keep Gitmo open during his first term, saying he wanted to fill it with ‘bad dudes’, though he never did. Now he has his chance.
