Hand -up and dressed in prison points, a small batch of prisoners are waiting in line to march into a transport plane and flew to a new house that has a uniquely notorious place in the annals of American justice.
The ten prisoners, all members of Tren de Aragua, a violent Venezuelan criminal gang who succeeded in infiltrating America, are about to board the very first flight of 'Criminal Aliens', who left for Guantanamo Bay last week .
More than 20 years after the world saw the first shocking photos of suspected Islamic terrorists who were held on the same American naval base – kneeling in buoys and wearing orange jumpsuits, face masks, glasses and headphones to block their vision and hearing – the Trump – Government has pushed it off by 'Gitmo' to co -do its critics, as it is often called, as the newest weapon in its fight against illegal immigration.
“President Donald Trump has been very clear: Guantanamo Bay will keep the worst of the worst. That starts today, “said Homeland Security Secretary Kristi, referring to the Venezuelans.
Trump has announced that the Cuban base will be a holding center for 30,000 immigrants – the 'worst criminal aliens' and people who are 'difficult to deport'.
Armed soldiers are preparing this month on the first flight of foreign criminals to Guantanamo Bay
Some of the prisoners are viewed by American troops on the asphalt at the airport
The president “does not rumble and he will no longer allow America to be a landfill for illegal criminals from countries about this world,” said his press secretary.
Some will be on their way to a small detention center at the base, which is currently being used to accommodate migrants collected from the Caribbean Sea on the way to the US, while much more will be housed in tents that hundreds of soldiers and marines already to set up.
However, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseeth says that dangerous deportees can still be placed in prison, which still contains 15 terror suspects, including the alleged brain of 9/11, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.
Although Hegseeth stated that they would only be kept there temporarily, Trump seems to suggest something else – slightly closer to the gloomy fate of the other prisoners of Guantanamo.
“Some of them are so bad that we don't even trust the countries to hold them, because we don't want them to come back, so we're going to send them to Guantanamo,” Trump said in January. That doesn't sound very temporary. In the meantime, Kristi would not mention that women and children are sent there.
Campaigners of civil freedoms have accused Trump of encouraging Americans to associate migrants with terrorism – an indictment that the president did not move.
Indeed, the Trump government hopes that the prospect of a long enchantment at the base – described by critics as a 'legal black hole' in which Washington could torture, abuse and torture prisoners unpunished – future criminals to enter the country in come illegal.
The same logic of deterrence was behind the Doomed Rwanda schedule of the VK to deport small boat migrants to the East African country to process their asylum applications. Now suspended by the Labor Government, the scheme had many critics.
Even Rwanda and his war -destroyed past, however, will have difficulty compete for fame with Gitmo. Trump inherits a toxic and extremely expensive regime in Guantanamo, that successive American presidents (although he) have sworn – and has not failed – to close.
The miserable prisoners include four so -called 'Forever Prisoners', who, the US, says it can never release because they are too dangerous. Yet they cannot be tried because they will reveal details about the torture program of the CIA, including the identities of officers – so that they endanger.
Military police in Guantanamo Escort A prisoner to his cell after the terror attacks in 2001
The military prison in Cuba has a notorious tough regime
The most infamous of these is Abu Zubaydah, a Palestinian in Saudi-born Palestinian that was used as the guinea pig for the CIA torture program, once 83 times a month Waterboard. The American government accepted a long time ago that Zubaydah was not, as it initially believed, was a top al-Qaeda leader and perhaps nothing knew nothing about the 9/11 plans, although it is still it that he was a terrorist.
Other prisoners have been stuck in legal Limbo for years, because lawyers considering their affairs are arguing about the central question of whether military committees can allow torture when pursuing justice.
Trump has warned migrants that Gitmo is a tough place to get out of it. ” That is hardly surprising in view of the fact that the 15 who are continuing to be monitored in an extensive security operation in which 800 soldiers and civilians are involved, and from 2019 the US $ 440 million per year cost.
That would now work out if $ 36 million (£ 29 million) per prisoner, and experts say that that figure will probably not even take extra costs that have been classified. Even Nazi chef Rudolf Hess reportedly cost only $ 1.5 million a year to guard when he was the only prisoner who was in the Spandau prison of Berlin in the 1980s who was in the 1980s.
George W. Bush ordered the Gitmo facility to build in January 2002 on the small naval base to keep terrorism suspects and 'illegal enemy fighters' after the attacks of 11 September on the World Trade Center and Pentagon.
Donald Trump with governor of South Dakota Kristi call during the presidential campaign
Although communist Cuba had always been an irreconcilable opponent of the US, the site was rented to America for an indefinite period of time for a peppercorn rental in 1903 (the Havana government opposes the lease and has the base surrounded with a minefield, so that all stocks have to get through the air or sea).
By 2003 it was the home of nearly 700 prisoners, all suspected members or employees of Al-Qaeda and their Taliban allies. The Government Bush claimed that it was not mandatory to grant the Gitmo prisoners of basic protection under the American Constitution or the Geneva conventions, because the first did not extend to foreign soil and this did not apply to 'illegal enemy Fighters'.
And so the prisoners could be held indefinitely and prevented them from challenging their detention legally. What justice that the prisoners can expect comes from a military committee that is fully compiled from our military – a system of the system that the British law of Lord Steyn has been rejected as a 'kangaroo -court' and a 'monstrous failure of justice'.
Hence the claims that it is a 'legal black hole' – a place where the prevention of another terrorist attack overwrites the normal standards of US government behavior.
These expired standards in particular include the subject of suspects to what the US government called 'improved interrogation techniques', but what critics called torture.
Although the most notorious example is water boarding, or simulated drowning, others related to lack of sleep and exposure to extreme temperatures, endless bright lights and loud music.
In 2022, UN experts condemned the 20th anniversary of the facility opening, it as a site of 'unparalleled fame' and said that the constant operation was a 'stain of the dedication of the US government for the rule of law'.
So why didn't presidents want to do it as Barack Obama, Joe Biden and even George W Bush? The obstruction is the congress that continues to prohibit the transfer of Gitmo prisoners to the American soil.
Neither can prisoners be sent to other countries, unless the US is sure that they can keep an eye on them.
In January, President Biden released 11 Yemeni prisoners – including two former bodyguards of Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden – to restart their lives in Oman, a regional ally of the US.
Who is left? They vary in age from 45 to 63 and come from Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Indonesia, Pakistan, Saudi -Arabia, Somalia and Yemen. One is a stateless Rohingya, a Muslim minority in Myanmar, while the other, Zubaydah, is Palestinian.
All three out of three were previously in secret 'black site' prisons run by the CIA, where they were subjected to torture or 'improved interrogation' and held Incommunicado during years of insulation.
The longest serving Gitmo prisoner, Ali Hamza al-Bahlul, who was brought from Afghanistan to the base on the day the prison was opened (four months after the attacks of 11 September), there is now a lifelong prison sentence because he is the Media assistant of Osama Bin Laden is, making his propaganda videos. The last British resident, Saudi Shaker Aamer, was released in 2015 after he had been held there for 13 years without charge.
Trump promised to keep Gitmo open during his first term and said he wanted to fill it with 'bad guys', although he never did. Now he has his chance.
