Guantanamo Bay detention camp
The Guantanamo Bay detention camp is a United States military prison within Naval Station Guantanamo Bay, on the coast of Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. It was established in 2002 by President George W. Bush to hold terrorism suspects and "illegal enemy combatants" during the "war on terror" following the September 11 attacks., at least 780 people from 48 countries have been detained at the camp since its creation, of whom 756 had been released or transferred to other detention facilities, 9 died in custody, and 15 remain.
Following the September 11 attacks, the United States led a multinational military operation against Taliban-ruled Afghanistan to dismantle al-Qaeda and capture its leader, Osama bin Laden. During the invasion, in November 2001, Bush issued a military order allowing the indefinite detention of foreign nationals without charge and preventing them from legally challenging their detention. The U.S. Department of Justice claimed that habeas corpus—a legal recourse against unlawful detention—did not apply to Guantanamo because it was outside U.S. territory. In January 2002, a temporary detention facility dubbed "Camp X-Ray" was created to house suspected Al-Qaeda members and Taliban fighters. By May 2003, the Guantanamo Bay detention camp had grown into a larger and permanent facility that housed over 680 prisoners, most without formal charges. The Bush administration maintained it was not obliged to grant prisoners protections under the U.S. Constitution or the Geneva Conventions, since the former did not extend to foreign soil and the latter did not apply to "unlawful enemy combatants". Humanitarian and legal advocacy groups claimed these policies were unconstitutional and violated international human rights law; several landmark U.S. Supreme Court decisions found that detainees had rights to due process and habeas corpus but were still subject to military tribunals.
Detainees are reported to have been housed in unfit conditions, abused and tortured, often in the form of "enhanced interrogation techniques". As early as 2003, the International Committee of the Red Cross warned of "deterioration in the psychological health of a large number of detainees". Reports by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, as well as intergovernmental institutions such as the Organization of American States and the United Nations, concluded that detainees had been systematically mistreated in violation of their human rights. The detention camp has faced legal, political, and international scrutiny, along with criticism regarding its operations and treatment of detainees. In 2005, Bush acknowledged the facility's necessity but expressed a desire for its eventual closure. His administration began winding down the detainee population, releasing or transferring around 540 detainees by the end of the administration. In 2009, Bush's successor, President Barack Obama, ordered closure of the facility within a year and to identify lawful alternatives for detainees; however, bipartisan opposition from the U.S. Congress, on the grounds of national security, prevented closure. During the Obama Administration, the number of inmates was reduced from 250 to 41, but controversial policies such as use of military courts remained. In 2018, President Donald Trump signed an order to keep the detention camp open indefinitely, and only one prisoner was repatriated during his administration. After taking office in 2021, President Joe Biden vowed to close the camp before his term ended, though his administration continued expansions to courtrooms and other facilities. Following the release of 25 detainees, 15 detainees remain as of January 2025; of these, three await transfer, nine have been charged or convicted of war crimes, and three are held in indefinite law-of-war detention, without facing tribunal charges nor being recommended for release.
In January 2025, Trump signed a memorandum to begin expansion of the Guantanamo Migrant Operations Center to house up to 30,000 migrants under detention, separate from the military prison. The migrant facility will be run by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. He signed a memorandum for an unnumbered "additional detention space". In March, the U.S. government transferred an undisclosed number of immigrants from the Guantanamo detention facility to Louisiana. The transfer came as a court reviews the legality of their detention and relocation. The move follows increased scrutiny of U.S. immigration policies and use of Guantanamo for detaining non-citizens outside of traditional immigration processes.
History
During the 1898 Spanish–American War, U.S. forces invaded and occupied Cuba amid its war of independence against Spain. In 1901, an American-drafted amendment to the Cuban constitution nominally recognized Cuba's sovereignty while allowing the U.S. to intervene in local affairs and establish naval bases on land leased or purchased from the Cuban government. The Cuban–American Treaty of Relations of 1903 reaffirmed these provisions, and that same year, the Guantánamo Bay Naval Base was established pursuant to a lease agreement with no expiration date. The 1934 Cuban–American Treaty of Relations superseded much of the 1903 treaty but reaffirmed the Guantánamo Bay lease, under which Cuba retains ultimate sovereignty but the U.S. exercises sole jurisdiction. Since coming to power in 1959, Cuba's communist government considers the U.S. military presence at Guantánamo Bay illegal and has repeatedly called for its return. During the Bill Clinton administration and the Haitian refugee crisis, the US Coast Guard collected tens of thousands Haitian refugees to the camp.The Guantanamo Bay Naval Base, including the detention camp, is operated by the Joint Task Force Guantanamo of the Southern Command of the Department of Defense. The main detention compound is Camp Delta, which replaced the temporary Camp X-Ray in April 2002, with other compounds including Camp Echo, Camp Iguana, and the Guantanamo psychiatric ward. The base occupies 45 square miles of land and water.
After political appointees at the U.S. Office of Legal Counsel, Department of Justice advised the George W. Bush administration that "a federal district court could not properly exercise habeas jurisdiction over an alien detained at GBC ", military guards took the first twenty detainees to Camp X-Ray on 11 January 2002. At the time, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said the detention camp was established to detain extraordinarily dangerous people, to interrogate detainees in an optimal setting, and to prosecute detainees for war crimes. In practice, the site has long been used for alleged "enemy combatants".
The DoD at first kept secret the identity of the individuals held in Guantanamo, but after losing attempts to defy a Freedom of Information Act request from the Associated Press, the U.S. military officially acknowledged holding 779 prisoners in the camp.
The Bush administration asserted that detainees were not entitled to any of the protections of the Geneva Conventions, while also claiming it was treating "all detainees consistently with the principles of the Geneva Convention." Ensuing U.S. Supreme Court decisions since 2004 have determined otherwise and that U.S. courts do have jurisdiction: it ruled in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld on 29 June 2006, that detainees were entitled to the minimal protections listed under Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions. Following this, on 7 July 2006, the Department of Defense issued an internal memo stating that detainees would, in the future, be entitled to protection under Common Article 3.
Current and former detainees have reported abuse and torture, which the Bush administration denied. In a 2005 Amnesty International report, the facility was called the "Gulag of our times." In 2006, the United Nations unsuccessfully demanded that Guantanamo Bay detention camp be closed. On 13 January 2009, Susan J. Crawford, appointed by Bush to review DoD practices used at Guantanamo Bay and oversee the military trials, became the first Bush administration official to concede that torture occurred at Guantanamo Bay on one detainee, saying "We tortured Qahtani."
On 22 January 2009, President Obama issued a request to suspend proceedings at Guantanamo military commission for 120 days and to shut down the detention facility that year. On 29 January 2009, a military judge at Guantanamo rejected the White House request in the case of Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, creating an unexpected challenge for the administration as it reviewed how the United States brings Guantanamo detainees to trial. On 20 May 2009, the United States Senate passed an amendment to the Supplemental Appropriations Act of 2009 by a 90–6 vote to block funds needed for the transfer or release of prisoners held at the Guantanamo Bay detention camp. President Obama issued a presidential memorandum dated 15 December 2009, ordering Thomson Correctional Center, Thomson, Illinois, to be prepared to accept transferred Guantanamo prisoners.
The Final Report of the Guantanamo Review Task Force, dated 22 January 2010, published the results for the 240 detainees subject to the review: 36 were the subject of active cases or investigations; 30 detainees from Yemen were designated for "conditional detention" due to the poor security environment in Yemen; 126 detainees were approved for transfer; 48 detainees were determined "too dangerous to transfer but not feasible for prosecution".
On 6 January 2011, President Obama signed the 2011 Defense Authorization Bill, which, in part, placed restrictions on the transfer of Guantanamo prisoners to the mainland or to foreign countries, thus impeding the closure of the facility. In February 2011, U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates said that Guantanamo Bay was unlikely to be closed, due to opposition in the Congress. Congress particularly opposed moving prisoners to facilities in the United States for detention or trial. In April 2011, WikiLeaks began publishing 779 secret files relating to prisoners in the Guantanamo Bay detention camp.
On 4 November 2015, President Barack Obama stated that he was preparing to unveil a plan to close the facility and move some of the terrorism suspects held there to U.S. soil. The plan would propose one or more prisons from a working list that includes facilities in Kansas, Colorado and South Carolina. Two others that were on the list, in California and Washington State, do not appear to have made the preliminary cut, according to a senior administration official familiar with the proposal. By the end of the Obama Administration on 19 January 2017, however, the detention center remained open, with 41 detainees remaining.
In June 2022, The New York Times publicly released photographs of the first camp detainees following a Freedom of Information Act request.