Obama Resettled Ex-Gitmo Prisoners, Now Disappeared
President Barack Obama’s mission to close the Guantánamo Bay prison has ultimately led to many of the prisoners being misplaced.
The U.S. military prison, known as Gitmo or GTMO, holds inmates in Cuba that have been detained indefinitely without trial. The horrific conditions of the camp and how poorly the prisoners are treated has attracted the attention of human rights groups like Amnesty International.
Obama reduced the number of prisoners from 242 to 41 when he was in office and moved 150 of the “lower-risk” prisoners to unstable locations around the world.
Almost two dozen of these prisoners have vanished since they were transferred to a rehabilitation program by the United Arab Emirates.
“Interviews with attorneys for 19 of the former detainees found that few if any of the 23 men transferred to the UAE between 2015 and 2017 have been released, despite what attorneys said were informal assurances that they would be out within about a year,” writes The Washington Post.
Senegal, a country that took in some of the prisoners, deported two of them to “their chaotic birth country of Libya” where they “fell into the hands of a hard-line militia leader who has been accused of prisoner abuse” and then “vanished.”
“The case sets a worrisome precedent, current and former officials said. The danger, they say, is that other countries may follow Senegal in forcibly moving more of the nearly 150 Obama-era resettled former detainees home to unstable places where they risk being killed — or could end up becoming threats themselves,” writes The New York Times.
The NYT tries to blame the Trump administration for the misplacement of the prisoners.
“The breakdown of the Senegal resettlement also appears to be at least partly a consequence of the disorganization that has afflicted the State Department since Mr. Trump took office. The Obama administration set up a high-level, centralized office charged with monitoring former detainees indefinitely and dealing with any problems. But Rex W. Tillerson, Mr. Trump’s first secretary of state, shuttered it, so that function was added to the long list of things individual embassies are supposed to track.” writes the NYT.
According to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI,) 30 percent of the released Gitmo detainees were suspected or confirmed terrorists.
Trump has taken a stricter approach to dealing with these prisoners, whom he has called “extremely dangerous people.”
He has vowed to keep the prison open and has halted the resettlement of the detainees and instead will be making decisions to release a prisoners “on a case-by-case basis.”
Author’s note: Lets not forget that these are terrorists and criminals. Prisoners are sent to Gitmo indefinitely for a reason. They will kill again if they have the opportunity. Some of missing detainees may have been captured and held as prisoners elsewhere, but it’s more likely that they rejoined their terrorist organizations. How is this the Trump administration’s fault? Personally, I think we should focus on the Gitmo prison conditions, not on resettling detainees so they can live a better-prisoned life elsewhere.
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