Guantánamo Prison– Twenty Three Years of Stain On the U.S.

Photos: Leon Kunstenaar

(San Francisco, Nov. 6) As Trump deprives 42 million American (12% of the population) of legally mandated food assistance while building palaces and monuments, the US spends half a billion a year maintaining the Guantánamo prison in Cuba.

From closeguantanamo.org:
779 prisoners have been held by the U.S. military at Guantánamo since the prison opened on January 11, 2002. Of those, 755 have been released or transferred, and nine have died, the last of these being Adnan Latif, in September 2012.including one who was transferred to the U.S. to be tried and subsequently convicted.

15 men are still held, and three have long been approved for release, one by a high-level governmental review process under President Obama back in January 2010. Three others have been accurately described as "forever prisoners," held explicitly without charge or trial, and with their cases only reviewed via an administrative, rather than a legal process, the Periodic Review Boards, which were established under President Obama.

Nine others are facing or have faced trials in the broken military commission system. Six have active cases, one is serving a life sentence, largely in solitary confinement, after a one-sided trial in 2008 in which he refused to mount a defense, another agreed to a plea deal in 2022, while the last of the nine is in legal limbo, after a DoD Sanity Board ruled that he was unfit to stand trial in 2023.