Guantanamo Bay: Past, Present and Future
Guantanamo: past, present and future
The Naval Base at Guantánamo Bay is the oldest U.S. military base still operating outside the U.S. It has been under U.S. control since 1898 but it was not used to hold prisoners from the Afghanistan war until January 2002. Since then, hundreds of “law combatants” have been held there against the Geneva Convention and their rights have been removed.
Guantanamo Bay Detention Camp became a matter of international concern when it was stated that the prisoners were, in fact, prisoners of war and therefore entitled to some rights, as specified in the Geneva Convention. Since that moment, other incidents such as the suicide attempts and the beating of innocent people (Kristof, 2004), have drawn the public eye towards Guantanamo.
This essay will be looking at what the current president of the United States, Barack Obama, said and promised during his presidential campaign regarding the closure of Guantanamo Bay Detention Camp and the ending of the torture and the use of abusive interrogation methods, along with what has actually been
Further on, it will expose the way in which prisoners are captured and taken to the detention camp, and the conditions in which they are held in Guantanamo Bay Detention Camp, as well as the humiliations and tortures they go through once they are there. Also, it will talk about the different types of torture and will focus on the practice that was declared legal by the government of the United States. In order to make this paper easier to understand, it is necessary to explain the differences between the terms “prisoner of war” and “unlawful combatants” together with a short summary of what the Geneva Convention implies with regards to the aforementioned terms. The most relevant difference between POWs (Prisoners of war) and unlawful combatants is that POWs are entitled to a set of rights stated in the Geneva Convention. Because unlawful combatants do not fight by the accepted rules of war, they do
The Naval Base at Guantánamo Bay is the oldest U.S. military base still operating outside the U.S. It has been under U.S. control since 1898 but it was not used to hold prisoners from the Afghanistan war until January 2002. Since then, hundreds of “law combatants” have been held there against the Geneva Convention and their rights have been removed.
Guantanamo Bay Detention Camp became a matter of international concern when it was stated that the prisoners were, in fact, prisoners of war and therefore entitled to some rights, as specified in the Geneva Convention. Since that moment, other incidents such as the suicide attempts and the beating of innocent people (Kristof, 2004), have drawn the public eye towards Guantanamo.
This essay will be looking at what the current president of the United States, Barack Obama, said and promised during his presidential campaign regarding the closure of Guantanamo Bay Detention Camp and the ending of the torture and the use of abusive interrogation methods, along with what has actually been
Further on, it will expose the way in which prisoners are captured and taken to the detention camp, and the conditions in which they are held in Guantanamo Bay Detention Camp, as well as the humiliations and tortures they go through once they are there. Also, it will talk about the different types of torture and will focus on the practice that was declared legal by the government of the United States. In order to make this paper easier to understand, it is necessary to explain the differences between the terms “prisoner of war” and “unlawful combatants” together with a short summary of what the Geneva Convention implies with regards to the aforementioned terms. The most relevant difference between POWs (Prisoners of war) and unlawful combatants is that POWs are entitled to a set of rights stated in the Geneva Convention. Because unlawful combatants do not fight by the accepted rules of war, they do