Closing Gitmo: Will President Biden Succeed?

The infamous prison camp at the US Navy Base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, was opened in early 2002 to house alleged terrorists the U.S. apprehended in Afghanistan. The camp became notorious as a symbol of U.S. human rights abuses. President Joe Biden has pledged to finally close it. Will he succeed? Karen Greenberg, Director of the Center on National Security at Fordham Law, joins us today to break it all down.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:07):
From the recount on Marina nine and and you're listening
to the Recount Daily Pod. Today is Tuesday, October eleven.
It's really hard to imagine that we as a country
have refused to hold really anyone accountable for creating what
is a good test abuse of human rights. That was
Karen Greenberg, director of the Center on National Security at

(00:29):
fordhom Law, speaking about the prison at Guantanamo Bay. Parents
also out with a new book, Subtle Tools, The Dismantling
of American Democracy from the War on Terror to Donald Trump.
We'll dig into that a little later on, but first
your morning headlines. We began at the gas pump, where
prices reached a seven year high on Monday. According to

(00:50):
the American Automotive Association or Triple A, the national average
has doubled since April, when airports and roads were deserted
due to the pandemic. It's now whopping three dollars and
seven cents a gallon. Analysts say that supply simply hasn't
kept up with surging demand, all of which worsened what's
now a global energy crisis. Last week, OPEC made the

(01:11):
decision not to raise production, despite request from the US
to do so. That will likely keep gas prices inflated
into the winter months, when heating oil will also be
in high demand. A cold or the normal winter could
push oil prices up as well. Next to COVID, Texas
Governor Greg Abbott issued an executive order late Monday night

(01:33):
barring all vaccine mandates in the state, including by private employers.
The order states that no entity in Texas can compel
proof of vaccination for any individual, including employees or customers.
He also called on state lawmakers to take up the
issue in an ongoing special session. The executive order is

(01:53):
in direct conflict with President Joe Biden's September announcement requiring
all employers with a hundred or more yees demandate vaccinations.
Facebook and Google, both of which employ large numbers of
people in the state, already have informed employees they would
need proof of vaccination to return to their offices. Neither
company has responded publicly yet to add its orders. On

(02:15):
the therapy front, Murk and Company, along with partner Ridge
Back Biotherapeutics, LP, have filed an application with the Food
and Drug Administration asking health officials to authorize their COVID
nineteen pill. The filing comes shortly after. Data show that
the pill will cut the risk of hospitalization or death
by fifty in high risk people. Unlike COVID nineteen vaccines

(02:38):
that target the spike protein, the pill works by targeting
a part of the virus that helps it reproduce. The
FDA could clear the pill in the coming weeks, potentially
in time to offset a surge in winter cases. The pill,
if authorized, would be the first oral anti viral to
treat COVID nineteen. Of course of treatment is forty pills,

(02:58):
eight daily for five days, has to be started within
five days of showing symptoms. We end with an alleged
case of espionage. Jonathan Toby, a Navy nuclear engineer, and
his wife have been arrested on charges of selling secret
information about the design of nuclear power warships to someone
they thought was a foreign power. In actuality, it was

(03:21):
an undercover FBI agent. The engineer was given a good
faith deposit of ten thous dollars in cryptocurrency. That's according
to the Department of Justice. He and his wife allegedly
went to West Virginia, where they placed a memory card
with a classified information into a half eaten peanut butter
and jelly before being caught. Toby and his wife are

(03:42):
set up here in Federal court this morning, and now
to our daily Deep died. The infamous prison camp at
the U. S. Navy base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, was
opened in early two thousand two to house alleged terrorists
the US apprehended in Afghanistan. In the twenty years since,
almost eight men have passed through its walls. Most were

(04:02):
never formally charged. The camp became notorious as a symbol
of US human rights abuses. President Joe Biden has pledged
to finally close it, but will he succeed. Karen Greenberg
is a director of the Center on National Security at
fortem Law and author of the new book Subtle Tools,
The Dismantling of American Democracy from the War on Terror
to Donald Trump. She joins us now to break it

(04:24):
all down. Karen, thanks so much for joining us. Thanks
so much for having me. You bet so for somebody
who may never have heard about Guantanamobey, I'm sure most
of our listeners have. But how would you explain Guantanamobey.
Oh goodness, to explain it, just to be clear, is
not to justify it. After the attacks of nine eleven.
The United States knew so little about Afghanistan, about al

(04:49):
Qaeda and its presence of Afghanistan because there was no
real intelligence capacity on the ground, and so the United
States rounded up people just sort of willy nilly. Some
of them were sold for bounty to the United States.
They didn't exactly know who they had, and instead of
keeping them outside the battlefield or near the battlefield, which
is the traditional way you hold prisoners in a war,

(05:11):
they brought them all the way to Cuba, to a
naval base that the United States had at Cuba, and
the idea was that they would be able to ask
them questions like where is the head of al Qaeda?
You know, where has been laden? Where is the next
attack going to come from? Truth is, these are not
people who knew the answer to that question. But that
was the original idea. It was set up, however, with

(05:32):
the idea that there would be military commissions. Oh yeah,
we'll bring them here and we'll try them. But the
people that they brought there in the beginning where not
people they were going to try. They were foot soldiers
at best, and some of them just people in the
wrong place at the wrong time. We mentioned intro, eight
hundred men were brought in over the years. Is there
a sense of how many of those eight hundred were innocent,
were essentially not linked to crimes. Let me put it

(05:55):
this way. President George Bush, whose administration opened Guantanamo Bay,
oversaw the release of over five hundred of them on
the grounds that they did not pose danger to the
United States. President Obama, at the end of his presidency
released another nearly two hundreds. So of those almost eight
hundred that you mentioned, we now have thirty nine left

(06:18):
at Guantanamo Bay. Of those thirty nine, interestingly enough, twelve
are in the military commissions that I mentioned before, and
that's actually one of the more interesting parts about Guantanamo Bay.
In two thousand and six, President Bush announced that he
was going to be moving a new batch of individuals

(06:38):
fourteen what he called high value detainees to Guantanamo Bay,
people in custody who had been tortured at CIA black
sites for information during interrogations. And they were the people
who were going to the idea was stan trial for
the attacks of nine eleven and for other attacks against
Americans and around the world to the prison at Guantanamo Bay.

(07:01):
Is as old as the War on terror twenty years,
can you remind us of the human rights abuses, the torture,
what were some of the worst practices that we're committed there.
So we do know a lot about what was done
both at the CIA Black sides and at Guantanamo Bay,
in part because some of the individuals have gotten out,
have written books, and apart from very good reporting from

(07:21):
journalists in many places, when you actually read the documents
that were written by the lawyers saying, you know, we
can waterboard individuals, we can slap them around, we can
hang them in stress positions that will distort their bodies,
perhaps for life. We can have psychological abuse where they
won't be able to sleep because of loud noise, and
many other grotesque things. When you read about that, it's

(07:45):
really hard to imagine that we as a country have
refused to hold really anyone accountable for creating what is
a good tesk abuse of human rights. Diane Finstein Senator
Diane Feinstein lead a many year investigation into what happened
at the CIA black sites in terms of interrogation. The

(08:08):
conclusion of her report, which we've only seen six hundred
pages of, but is six thousand pages long, is that
torture and mistreatment of individuals in CIA interrogations did not
produce reliable information. Three of the last four presidents, including Biden,
have all said we're going to close this facility. Why

(08:31):
is it still open? So since two thousand and eleven,
during President Obama, we haven't been able to transfer anybody
from Guantanamo Bay to the United States, not for any reason,
not for medical reasons, not for trial, not for incarceration.
Congress passed this for two thousand and eleven, the Defense
Authorization Act, in which that is included. They can't come here,

(08:51):
and so every person who is relocated from Guantanamo Bay
has to go through a series of negotiations at the
State Department and others have to make with host countries
that have to do with security for the United States
in terms of how that person is going to behave
once they're there, whether they'll be watched, how they'll be watched,
and security for the individual themselves so that their human

(09:12):
rights are not abused. And it is a massively complex
series of negotiations for each one of the individuals. That's
one reason. Another reason is that the United States has
decided to try a number of these individuals. There are
four cases going forward. Finally, in the military commissions, the
trial of the alleged co conspirators of nine eleven is

(09:32):
still a year or more away. This is already twenty
years after the attack, fifteen years after these individuals have
been in custody. So the Military commissions are also yet
another stage of holding it up. But the bottom line
is when you break the laws and the rules of morality, decency,
the Constitution, and other things international domestic law as profoundly

(09:56):
as the United States both laws, it's hard to put
things back together. We've got to take a quick break.
We'll be right back with Karen Greenberg, author of the
new book Subtle Tools, The dismantling of American Democracy from
the War on Terror to Donald Trump. You're listening to
the Recount Daily Pod. Welcome back to the Recount Daily Pod,

(10:19):
a podcast from the Recamp and I Heart Radio. I'm
joined by Karen Greenberg. We're talking about Biden's ambition to
finally close Guantanamo Bay. What were the laws that were
broken at guantanam obey by the US. Oh my god, So,
I mean, these are legal principles that the United States

(10:39):
has had since it's very beginning. It's not just the laws,
it's the constitutional protections that I think we should talk about.
Do process rights, the idea that you would hold people
in custody without the right to a lawyer, which was
the initial guantanamobey when they first opened it, right, the
Eighth Amendment, right to protections against abuse and cruelty, and
there are many other protections that are violated. The Uniform

(11:03):
Code of Military Justice does not condone torture. The United
States supported and signed on to the Convention against Torture,
with the international law that forbids torture. One of the
big things my new book is about is the use
of language to get around the law. Do not call
these individuals prisoners? Why? Because if we call them prisoners,

(11:24):
and if they are prisoners of war, then the international
laws of war pertained the Geneva conventions of how you
have to treat somebody in custody, of how you're allowed
to interrogate them or not interrogate them. So this fundamental
willingness to break the law, the willing agbrogation of laws
and norms, was involved with the War on Terror from

(11:46):
the very start, and Guantanamo was just the most iconic,
longest lasting, and even though far away, visible sign of this.
In the United States, you read your miranda rights, you
have the right to remain silent, and a basic thing
that all of us are pretty much taught in school,
what exactly are the rights of somebody who's taken prisoner. Internationally,

(12:07):
they are allowed to be held to the end of hostilities.
One of the problems of having a forever war or
forever wars that are justified is the authorization for the
war is still there on the table. There was no
mention of the end of hostilities and is used for
drone strikes and for attacks in the name of terrorism
in a lot of places. But Guantanamo is still open.

(12:29):
So when you talk about rights under the laws of war,
this would be one of the things. The second thing
is they have the right not to be interrogated beyond
what we say in the United States name, rank, and
serial number. But the basis is you cannot torture them,
abuse them for interrogation reasons, and then also just conditions

(12:49):
of detention. Right the original detainees at Guantanamo were kept
in cages. Eventually they put some kind of roof over
them to protect them from the sun. Mostlee and rain
did not have toilet facilities. And these are just basic
human things when we're talking about these kinds of conditions,
not how they were treated, being subject to beatings, etcetera, etcetera. So, yeah,

(13:13):
we're gonna positing a quick break. We'll be right back
with Karen Greenberg, author of the books Subtle Tools, The
Dismantling of American Democracy From the War on Terror to
Donald Trump. They're listening to The Recount Daily Pod. Welcome
back to the Recount Daily Pod podcast from The Recount
and I Heart Radio. Karen Greenberg joins us. She's author

(13:36):
of Subtle Tools, The Dismantling of American Democracy From the
War on Terror to Donald Trump. Does location matter why
Guantanamo Bay, Cuba? Well, yeah, it does matter if what
you're trying to do is make it so that no
other country where you might have a military base would say, no,
you can't do this on our soil. For example, Germany,

(13:57):
which would have been based closest and most convenient in
terms of in and out flights to Afghanistan. They knew
they couldn't set this up at Germany. It came up
in discussions and there was just no The Germans are
not going to allow us to have a detention facility there,
or if we did, it would have to be inside
the law. That's sort of the undercurrent of that. What's
been the fate of some of these prisoners that have

(14:19):
been released. Were they able to go back home, were
they able to be successfully reintegrated into society, what happens
to them? Many of them were able to go home,
But there are countries the United States does not and
particularly in latter years, did not want to return individuals
to Yemen being one of the obvious ones because of
its fragility, it's chaos, it's violence, with the sense that

(14:41):
maybe they would return to the cause of jihad right.
Others have been located around the world in a number
of countries, Morocco, Mauritania, but some have had horrendous experiences
in terms of being outcasts, just don't belong in the
countries they are in and aren't treated well. And so
it's the whole range. But the bottom line, if you

(15:03):
wanted to say how it's been, is that it's been tough. Afterwards,
as one of the detainees has said, afterwards, I feel
like him in Guantanamo two point Oh. You know, the restrictions,
the inability to really unite with family have made it
very difficult for a number of the detainees and the
continued suspicion that seems to follow them. Do you think

(15:24):
President Biden will be successful in closing Guantanamo Bay down
during his administration? Yes? Why are you so confident? I
may be the only person that I know that thinks that.
Partly because I really wanted to happen. This has to
be over. There has to be a turning point, partly
because his administration has given indications that they're serious about

(15:46):
moving beyond what I would call the post nine eleven era.
That chapter of terrorism and counter terrorism is over, whether
people like to acknowledge it or not, because of the
powers they want to continue with. He took the symbolic
step of clearing five detainees for release soon after he
became president. Hopefully the boards that meet to clear these

(16:08):
individuals will continue with some kind of maybe speed to
keep clearing people for release. He hasn't made any formal
appointments about people in charge to monitor the releases and
to make the arrangements happen. That's a step I think
is very important. But I think President Biden understands what
the stakes are. I think he wants to do it.

(16:28):
I think he has the will and the strength to
do it, just like he did with Afghanistan. One thing
about this presidency is that, particularly the State Department, they
talk about quiet diplomacy. Let's remember that President Obama came
out and on day one of his presidency said I'm
going to close Guantanama within a year and sent a

(16:50):
you know, a sigh of relief and hope throughout the
community of those who advocate for the prisoners and for
the rule of law. But it was a mistake. President
Obama got a head of his skis. The political backlash
was way more than he and others anticipated, and by
the time they were ready to do things, they could
only get almost two out, which is amazing. But it failed, right,

(17:13):
he failed to close Guantanamo. Biden not making any big proclamations.
His administration has said by the end of his term
would like to close Guantanamo. But I'm not sure we're
going to see any massive declarations, and I think that
is partly lessons learned. Maybe this will be a quieter approach.
I just hope that it's quick, because presidencies can be short,

(17:37):
and um backlash can be intense. But I do think
that Biden can close Guantanamo Bay. Before you go, you
say lessons learned for people who look back on this
period of history. What are the lessons that must not
be repeated in dealing with human rights abuses and America?

(17:57):
If you're going to have the laws us up, if
you're going to have norms, rely on that. The idea
that you would just have the rule of law when
it's convenient, that you would bypass your courts, which we
haven't used for the Guantanamo prisoners, except for one. That
you would mistreat people in ways that are fundamental to
you and with you are supposed to be a leader

(18:18):
of the world, and therefore by eroding them, you eroad
not just your own system, but you harm human rights
around the world. This country is going to not have
to just recover from the obvious excesses of the War
on Terror, but from the more subtle damage that was
done to our laws, our norms, and our sense of self.

(18:38):
And that's why I wrote this new book. By the way,
that's what it's about. The erosion at the more subtle level.
And so the lesson learned is that it's going to
be a long way back, and we need to start now.
Karen Greenberg. The book is called Subtle Tools, The Dismantling
of American Democracy from the War on Terror to Donald Trump. Karen,
I learned so much. Thank you for joining us, Thank
you so much for having mer in it. And now

(19:01):
to the look ahead. Here's what else we're watching today. First,
Lady Doctor Jill Biden heads out west to continue a
series of conversations listening sessions with the Hispanic community during
National Hispanic Heritage Month. First, she'll host a talk at
El Centro Academy in Kansas City, Kansas. Then she'll visit
the National Museum of Mexican Art in Chicago. Opening arguments

(19:23):
will be held at the U. S. Supreme Court in
the case of Cameron versus E m W Women's Surgical Center.
The case stems from E. MW's challenge to a Kentucky
law that would ban the most common abortion technique after
the fifteenth week of pregnancy, effectively denying women abortion access.
The issue in this narrowly defined case is whether Kentucky's

(19:44):
Attorney General Cameron can take over defense of the abortion
law after two lower courts already ruled the band unconstitutional.
While not directly tied to the abortion law, a ruling
for Cameron could open the door to efforts that put
the band back into place. The Pittsburgh Penguins face off
against the Tampa Bay Lightning and the first game of

(20:04):
the National Hockey League's official season. Tampa Bay is expected
to continue its winning streak after coming off their back
to back wins of the Stanley Cup. This will mark
the first full season since the pandemic started, with all
but five NHL players being fully vaccinated. Something new this
year is that all NHL teams will wear ADI Zone
Prime Green jerseys. They're made with the material that contains

(20:27):
a minimum of recycled content. I hope you have a
great day. This is a Recount Daily Pod podcast from
the Recount and I Heart Radio. Are thanks to Karen Greenberg,
director of the Center on National Security and Fordom Law,
for being on our show. And if you like this episode,

(20:48):
I hope you'll subscribe to The Recount Daily Pod and
usually of us a rating on the Apple podcast app.
I'm your host, RAINA nine fo