Why Should People Be Interested in Leaving Guantanamo?

Guantanamo Bay is both a critical cultural symbol and a real place where terrible things happen to real people.  Leaving Guantanamo is the rare book which looks at Guananamo from both perspectives.  The author, Eric Lewis, not only litigated Guantanamo cases for twenty years, he has come to know individual detainees—their lives before detention, their capture and torture on a massive scale, their road to release, and the lives they have tried to rebuild after going home. He tells their stories as well as the story of the legal and political battle that continue to rage.   

The nearly 800 men in the orange jumpsuits provided false hope to Americans after 9/11 that the “Global War on Terror” could be and was being won.  They were deemed “the worst of the worst,” even though within weeks, theUS government knew that they had captured nobodies—charity workers, merchants, a few low-level foot soldiers, nearly all sold for bounties; the handful of serious suspects only came years later.  The solution ordered by senior Bush officials: torture them all and see what you can find out.  Keep them in an offshore enclave without access to lawyers, courts or their own families.    Keep telling the public that they were all terrorists and prevent them from showing otherwise.  

If all this sounds familiar, it is because Guantanamo is still with us today.  Bush sent 800 Muslims there, the vast majority of whom had done nothing wrong.  Trump has already shuttled more than 700 migrants through the same facility and promises to send up to 30,000.  Once again, they are called “the worst of the worst”  They too are in the legal black hole that the government tries to create to deprive the rule of law to those it seeks to demonize.  And there are still more than 15 men still in indefinite detention from the first 9/11 wave, untried and forgotten, nearly a quarter century after they were first taken.