The Guantanamo Bay detention
center, located at a military base on the coast of Cuba, houses over one
hundred prisoners of the United States. These prisoners are those that are
suspected of being connected to terrorist organizations in countries across the
Atlantic, specifically in Northern Africa and in countries within Southwest
Asia. The prison camp was created in the tense period between the start
of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and has held some prisoners there for some
eleven years now. A recent hunger strike at the camp, involving one hundred of
the one hundred and sixty-six prisoners, has put more pressure on President
Obama to make good on his 2008 election promise to close Guantanamo.
I feel that the Guantanamo
Bay detention should be closed. My stance on this issue is based around two
points. First I believe that the basic function of the camp, to incapacitate
the prisoners held there, can be accomplished by high security and maximum
security facilities here in the United States. Simply put, I feel we’re spending
more money than we need to on a base that does a job we can already do here on
home soil. Secondly, an off-shore prison camp where detainees are held without
trial for an indefinite period of time with no opportunity to appeal their
imprisonment looks decidedly awful from a foreign policy standpoint for a
country that prides itself on ideals such as a fair trial and other rights of
the accused.
One of the issues facing the
closure of Guantanamo is what the federal government is going to do with all of
the prisoners. It has been suggested in the past that the prisoners could be
moved to maximum security facilities here in the United States. Not surprisingly
nearly every state wanted nothing to do with these prisoners. While I
understand the position of not wanting to have terrorists imprisoned in one’s
own state, I do not feel that this is a rational fear. I feel as though our
federal maximum-security prisons would do a more than sufficient job of keeping
this prisoners incapacitated in their ability to commit terrorist acts against
the citizens of the United States.
"Naval
Station Guantanamo Bay." CNIC // NAVAL STATION
GUANTANAMO BAY. Commander, Navy Installations Command, n.d. Web. 01 May
2013. <http://www.cnic.navy.mil/guantanamo/index.htm>.
4 comments:
Nice post and the topic was a change. In all honesty I never got the point of Guantanamo anyways. After reading your post I have to agree on the point that these prisoners should be tried already.
I agree with both of you that this facility should be closed, the whole issue is so hypocritical to the very things this country prides itself on. It is too bad that it takes a hunger strike to put pressure on our white house to deal with this issue.
The facility should be closed but the question is where do we keep these prisoners. No one wants to house them and they would cost a tremendous amount of money. It is a terrible catch 22. I do hope the facility is closed before Obama leaves office because that was one of the things that he promised when running for his first term.
I also read about this in the New York Times when the story broke, i have to agree, the prison should be close, personally i didn't think it should be opened in the first place, we could have reopened Alcatraz since well thats what we had it for, though it did seem like it was a better idea to open the prison in a place that was not on American soil.
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