Pros And Cons Of Guantanamo

Under the Obama Administration, while Guantanamo never was closed, major advances in the President’s agenda to strengthen America’s values of unalienable rights within Guantanamo were made. One of these advances was the transferring of innocent detainees to their home country, such as the release of five detainees back to their home country of Kazakhstan in December of 2014 (The Guantanamo Docket). Another push was for detainee rights - a new idea in the War on Terrorism - as public safety had previously taken full attention. Obama came out of the election with fresh actions to make his vision happen, which can be shown in a New York Times article on Obama’s actions over Guantanamo, “Mr. Obama’s opening gambits as president were bold declarations of new directions, from announcing the closing of the detention center at

Within the push for detainees’ rights, a focus on the right to a speedy trial was asserted by the President. Previously, suspected terrorists were tried under military law, but the Obama Administration pushed for the trying of these detainees in criminal court, as they were before 9/11. Through criminal courts, these suspects could not be held indefinitely anymore, thereby instilling our nation’s values on detainees. Although Obama was not able to completely close Guantanamo in his eight years of presidency, he made major advances in preserving the rights of detainees. From rights to a speedy trial to the basic human rights, torture was used at Guantanamo Bay as a form of interrogating detainees for information that may cause danger to America. Officers obtained this information through court authorized methods of mental and physical torture including: stress positions, mock executions, waterboarding, and extended periods of sleep deprivation (The Justice Campaign). One such account was from Mohamedou Ould Slahi, who revealed his experience with sleep deprivation torture at Guantanamo in a January 2015