President Donald Trump on Tuesday doubled down on his embrace of the offshore prison at Guantánamo Bay by signing an executive order to not only keep it open but to possibly imprison more people there in the never-ending, ever-expanding war on terror.
“Instead of vowing to end a longstanding national disgrace once and for all, the president instead signed an order that will keep prisoners detained without charge or trial in Guantánamo Bay,” said Margaret Huang, executive director of Amnesty International USA.
“We all must pledge—not one person more in Guantánamo, not in our names.”
—Hina Shamsi, ACLUTrump signed the order just before delivering his State of the Union address, though the move was not unexpected, in part because of a leaked document earlier this month. But also, as the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) said in press statement, “Trump has made no secret of his intention to keep Guantánamo open, touting it as far back as the 2016 presidential campaign, despite both the Bush and Obama administrations’ recognition that the prison should be closed for moral, national security, and diplomatic reasons.”
Indeed, during the campaign trail, Trump promised to “load it up with some bad dudes.”
Trump’s new executive order, CCR said, is also “unsurprising given Trump’s deep-seated racism, his well-documented antipathy toward all Muslims, and his endless puffing and posturing. The entire Trump White House is stacked with white supremacists who are blinded to reason by ignorance and bigotry,” the rights group said.
Forty-one men still languish there—many for over a decade. Twenty-eight of the men have never been charged with a crime.
In his address Tuesday, Trump said that “When possible, we annihilate” terrorists but that he is now asking Congressional lawmakers “to ensure that, in the fight against ISIS and al-Qaeda, we continue to have all necessary power to detain terrorists, wherever we chase them down, wherever we find them. And in many cases, for them, it will now be Guantánamo Bay.” [NPR notes that the comment was met with applause.]
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