Guantanamo is a stubborn stain on Obama’s record

US president Barack Obama promised to close the Guantanamo Bay prison on the campaign trail back in 2008 and his failure to do so will be a mark on his record, argues Sholto Byrnes

The Obama Administration’s crusade to close the US detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, is mired in state and federal politics. Ben Fox / AP Photo

Over the next couple of weeks much high-flown rhetoric will emanate from the vicinity of the United Nations headquarters in New York. The UN is celebrating its 70th anniversary. It will be adopting the Sustainable Development Goals. Pope Francis will address the General Assembly during his first visit to the United States. Much is anticipated.

While some will concentrate on the UN's shortcomings, others will rightly highlight its achievements, such as fulfilling the Millennium Development Goal of halving extreme poverty – a target that was actually met five years early, in 2010.

And as always, there will be plenty of talk about the lofty ideals that underpin the UN. As its secretary-general, Ban Ki-moon has put it: “The United Nations was created to save succeeding generations from war, protect human rights, establish conditions for justice, and promote social progress and better standards of life. These fundamental objectives remain as critical as ever.”

Yet just on the United States’ doorstep there remains a patch of American-occupied soil that is a provocation for bloodshed, that constitutes an egregious violation of human rights, where there is no justice, which has promoted social regress, and where standards of life are of little consideration for its administrators.

I refer to Guantanamo Bay, whose military prison camp was opened by George W Bush in 2002 and within three years was already being referred to as “the Gulag of our times” by Amnesty International. A Bush administration official later admitted that torture had occurred there, and accounts of the physical and sexual abuse that took place routinely in the camp make sickening reading.

President Barack Obama promised during his first campaign for the White House, in 2008, that he would close the facility. Yet seven years on, it is still open; and of the 115 detainees still there, nearly half – 52 – have never been charged, according to a recent New York Times report. The illegal war in Iraq ended years ago. Illegal torture has ceased being a regular part of American military practice (we hope). Illegal extraordinary rendition almost certainly continues, but by its very nature is not disclosed unless by accident, so public outrage is limited.

Illegal drone strikes also continue as, unfortunately, the American public has shown itself to be little troubled by the lack of legal due process when those targeted are non-Caucasians in faraway lands – even when they are US citizens, as in the case of Anwar Al Awlaki and his 16-year-old son Abdulrahman.

But it beggars belief that this illegal camp could not have been closed by now. It has become a byword for unlawful detention without trial, and the former UN high commissioner for human rights, Navi Pillay, said it showed the US as being “in clear breach not just of its own commitments but also of international laws and standards that it is obliged to uphold”.

Various excuses have been given: chiefly the difficulty of finding countries to take the prisoners, and the fact that many in Congress want to keep the facility going. Mr Obama is said to be “very committed to closing Guantanamo Bay”. “He does not want to leave this to his successor,” said the secretary of homeland security, Jeh Johnson, in July.

But Mr Obama is the president of the United States. And seven years is a long time. The great conflicts of the 20th century were concluded in shorter periods. Closing one military camp seems a less than Herculean task by comparison with the mobilisations and exertions of political capital they required.

We may hear little of this in the Republican presidential debates (it has barely merited a mention so far), and it may well be that when a scandal goes on for too long it is hard to sustain the outrage – although the injustice for those who suffer only worsens. But the ongoing crime that Guantanamo Bay’s continued existence represents is certainly noticed elsewhere. It serves as nothing less than a recruiting poster for terrorists, as the British human rights lawyer Clive Stafford Smith recently noted. “In 2001, the membership list of Al Qaeda would barely have filled a page,” he wrote. “For every prisoner in Guantanamo Bay, an intelligence officer once opined to me, we have provoked 10 people to do us harm.”

More than that, however, it seems certain that historians will look back on this period with incredulity that a country that frequently lectures others about the rule of law and the injustice of detention without trial – let alone without charge – could have perpetrated such a blatant violation of those principles; and that a chief executive who came to power vowing to right this wrong seemed unable, or unwilling to push hard enough, to do so.

It took only eight years after President John F Kennedy issued his “moonshot” challenge in 1961 for the country to land Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin on the Moon. Can Mr Obama really not achieve a much smaller aim in the same time frame? To close a military prison is surely not, after all, as they say “rocket science”. Someone should remind him of that during the UN meetings and celebrations in New York. The “land of the free” will never earn the world’s admiration when it acts as though those freedoms only belong to Americans, and not to those from different climes and with different faiths.

Sholto Byrnes is a senior fellow at the Institute of Strategic and International Studies, Malaysia