Ailey O’Toole
   Staff Writer

Since before he was elected, President Barack Obama has pledged to shut down the military prison at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, a facility that holds suspected members of terrorist groups capture overseas.

Though he has hit roadblock after roadblock, Obama has managed to whittle down the number of detainees from 241 to 107 during his time in office and he’s said he hopes to get that number below 100 during his time left in the White House.

President Obama has stated, and I have to agree that “instead of serving as a tool to counter terrorism, Guantanamo became a symbol that helped al-Qaeda recruit terrorists to its cause. Indeed, the existence of Guantanamo likely created more terrorists around the world than it ever detained.”

It is likely that terrorist leaders use the prison as a reason to continue their fight with America. “Gitmo” represents a great propaganda tool for those leaders to rally new recruits around, giving their cause a great reason to persist.

Another point of contention when it comes to Guantanamo Bay is the treatment of its inmates. Many of them are so poorly treated that they choose to participate in hunger strikes. For example, Tariq Ba Odah, a Yemeni cleared for release in 2009, has maintained a hunger strike since 2007. He is kept alive only by twice-daily forced feeding, a practice that has been deemed as torture by some.

Gitmo is also known as a prison that has used waterboarding techniques to solicit information from prisoners. I think we can all agree that waterboarding is horrific and inhumane. These kinds of practices in a prison are plenty of reason to shut it down.

Legally, Gitmo is a mess. It is a legal no-man’s-land. There is no civilian legal authority and US military authority is limited. Prisoners can be kept without due process. It violates the Geneva Conventions by stealthy avoiding the term “prisoner-of-war camp” and instead referring to prisoners as “enemy combatants.”

Prisoners have no way to prove their innocence because they are not given the right to legal representation or a fair trial. To date, not one of the nearly 800 incarcerated individuals at Guantanamo has been charged with any kind of crime recognized under either US or international law. How does that make Gitmo a prison? It sounds more like a holding place for “prisoners” that the US government thinks might be of use.

In early 2015, retired Maj. Gen. Michael Lehnert, who helped create the Guantanamo Bay prison we know today, came forward and expressed his desire to see the prison shut down: “Why do I want Guantanamo shuttered? Because it was always envisioned to be a temporary facility.”

Maj. Gen. Lehnert went on to say that the prison was supposed to be a safe and appropriate place to hold detainees during the winter, but when he arrived on sight, he was concerned about the “convoluted” process for deciding what to do with prisoners.

There seems to be much corruption within the system that controls Guantanamo Bay.

As if there weren’t enough moral and legal reasons to close Guantanamo, it is by comparison the world’s most expensive prison.

The annual cost per detainee stands at $3,345,061, according to Maj. Gen. Lehnert’s. With 107 prisoners, that’s $357,921,527 a year. Granted, that’s less than the $600 million it would take to close the prison, but we would only have to spend that money once to close the prison, rather than spending $360 million a year.

If you don’t believe the injustice being done to the prisoners or the ability of terrorist leaders to use these many violations as recruiting tools is enough reason, then hopefully the financial issues are reason enough.