ANALYSIS - Trump 'Obsession' With Filling Gitmo Likely To Prompt Legal Challenges

(@FahadShabbir)

ANALYSIS - Trump 'Obsession' With Filling Gitmo Likely to Prompt Legal Challenges

WASHINGTON (UrduPoint News / Sputnik - 07th September, 2018) US President Donald Trump is obsessed with filling the prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba to satiate his domestic political base despite the fact the move violates international law, analysts told Sputnik on Thursday.

The Trump administration is considering a plan to transfer to the Guantanamo detention facility high-profile members of the Islamic State (IS) terrorist group (banned in Russia) that have been captured in Iraq, NBC reported last week, citing US officials.

In January, during his first State of the Union address, Trump announced that he had signed an order to keep Guantanamo, often referred to as GTMO, open. The detention center was established in the wake of 9/11 to jail terror suspects indefinitely, but became notorious for human rights abuses. Former US President Barack Obama had promised to close the prison but failed to fulfill his pledge.

When Trump signed his order in January to keep the prison open, the White House in a statement said the US detention operations at Guantanamo Bay were safe, legal, humane and consistent with international law.

"It's an extremely worrisome development that concerns everyone in the human rights world who cares about GTMO," Jeremy Varon, associate professor of history at the New school in New York City and a prominent activist in the Witness Against Torture movement told Sputnik.

However, Trump could use the executive power of the presidency to approve a new flow of prisoners to be held indefinitely at Guantanamo if he chose to do so, Varon observed.

"There would be an outcry and immediate legal challenges but I don't know that anything technically stands in the way of new transfers," he said.

Varon noted that two of the relatively senior Islamic State (IS) figures suggested as likely transfers to Guantanamo were Alexandar Amon Kotey and El Shafee Elsheikh, members of a group of four jihadis dubbed "The Beatles" by observers because of their British accents.

Koteh and Elsheikh have been accused of carrying out the beheadings of several Western hostages on video, according to reports.

"The two 'Beatles' would be less controversial, perhaps, than other potential transfers - they sound like utterly loathsome human beings so the argument would be about the need for due process even for moral monsters," Varon pointed out.

Whatever loathsome crimes, the suspects being held at Guantanamo were accused of, they still had the right to justice and due process, along with the prisoners still interred there, Washington Peace Center member and activist Malachy Kilbride told Sputnik.

"The news that the Trump administration is contemplating sending more prisoners to Guantanamo is deeply disturbing. The prisoners presently in Guantanamo deserve as much justice as these new prospective indefinite detainees," he said.

The prisoners sent to Iraqi prisons also deserved to be treated according to international law, Kilbride added.

"Indefinite detention is an outrageous violation of law and I hope we would be moving in the direction of closing Guantanamo rather than keeping it open," he said.

Trump has seen Guantanamo as a useful symbol to show that America is tough on terrorism and has advocated for keeping it open since he was on the campaign trail. In February of 2016 Trump told a rally in Nevada that if elected president he would keep Guantanamo open and "load it up with bad dudes."

"Trump is obsessed with fulfilling his campaign promises, and filling up GTMO anew is one of them, however idiotic. [Holding] large numbers of IS fighters at the facility would be even more problematic, and it is not clear that many in the military want the burden of jailing them," Varon said.

However, Trump might forget about the issue or choose to prioritize trying to achieve other goals rather than pushing through with this idea, Varon added.

"We can only hope that Trump moves on to some other shiny ball, or that aides convince him what a terrible idea it would be," he said.

In May, Mattis submitted to Trump guidelines for picking candidates to send to the notorious detention center on the island of Cuba. A week later, the head of US Southern Command (SOUTHCOM), Admiral Kurt Tidd, told reporters that Guantanamo can handle a couple dozen more inmates without the need for additional resources.

In response to the Magnitsky Act, Russia imposed a travel ban on several former US officials who were involved in torture and human rights abuses at Guantanamo and Iraq's Abu Ghraib.