Donald Trump has signed an executive order to keep the Guantánamo Bay prison camp open, reversing the policy of the Obama administration.
In his State of the Union address on Tuesday night, Trump said he had directed the defence secretary, James Mattis, “to re-examine our military detention policy and to keep open the detention facilities at Guantánamo Bay”. He added that he expected that “in many cases” captured terrorists would be sent to the camp.
The Trump executive order instructs Mattis, in consultation with the secretary of state and other officials, to deliver a new policy on battlefield detentions, “including policies governing transfer of individuals to US Naval Station Guantánamo Bay” within 90 days.
It is the latest in a long series of policies pursued by Barack Obama that Trump has reversed. Obama signed an order calling for Guantánamo Bay to be closed on his second day in office in 2009, but he was never able carry out that policy to its conclusion.
Obama argued that maintenance of an detention facility beyond the reach of US law undermined American global leadership on human rights. In his speech on Tuesday night, however, Trump said that the move to close Guantánamo reflected softness in the fight against terrorism. And he suggested detention was second best to killing terrorists.
“Terrorists who do things like place bombs in civilian hospitals are evil,” Trump said. “When possible, we have no choice but to annihilate them. When necessary, we must be able to detain and question them. But we must be clear: terrorists are not merely criminals. They are unlawful enemy combatants. And when captured overseas, they should be treated like the terrorists they are.”
He added: “In the past, we have foolishly released hundreds of dangerous terrorists, only to meet them again on the battlefield – including the Isis leader, al-Baghdadi.”
Obama’s adversaries had claimed that Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi had been released from an Iraqi prison facility called Camp Bucca in 2009. However, the insurgent who went on to lead the Islamic State, was released by a military review board in 2004.
Trump did not announce he was about to order the transfer of new prisoners to Guantánamo Bay, and a leaked state department cable to embassies abroad said there were no immediate plans for transfer to Guantánamo. But the president left that option open in his speech.
“I am also asking the Congress to ensure that, in the fight against Isis and al-Qaida, we continue to have all necessary power to detain terrorists – wherever we chase them down, wherever we find them, and in many cases it will now be Guantánamo Bay.” Trump said.
The Obama administration transferred 200 inmates to other countries, but there are still 41 in the prison complex on a small US-run military zone on the southern coast of Cuba.
The Obama White House blamed Congress for the failure to close the camp, but there was also considerable resistance from the Pentagon and from foreign governments who were reluctant to accept custody of the remaining detainees. Keeping them on the island costs more than $440m a year.
The Guantánamo Bay camp was opened in 2002, as a place where terrorist suspects captured on the battlefield in Afghanistan could be held without access to family or lawyers and interrogated with very few rights and restraints on their captors.
It was supposed to be a place for detaining “the worst of the worst” in the words of the then defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, but most of the inmates who ended up there were foot soldiers, or people handed over by warlords for a bounty, or men who found themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time.
The decision to resume renditions to Guantánamo Bay drew outrage from human rights groups who have long campaign for its closure.
“We strongly condemn President Trump’s decision to keep the Guantánamo Bay detention center open,” Homer Venters, director of programs at Physicians for Human Rights, said in a written statement. “The facility is a symbol of US torture and injustice known around the world. It represents the unlawful, immoral, and harmful regime of indefinite detention and should be shuttered immediately.”