In this co-authored op-ed for The Guardian US, Karen J. Greenberg, director of the Center on National Security at Fordham Law School, argues that the Guantánamo Bay Detention Facility is a “worldwide symbol of American hypocrisy.”
Today we know Guantánamo mainly as the detention facility that held a total of 780 war on terror detainees over the past 23 years. The cruelty of Guantánamo has been exhaustively documented, notably in the 2023 UN special rapporteur’s report on the detention facility which described “the depth, severity, and evident nature of many detainees’ current physical and psychological harms”, both those still in Guantánamo and those who had been released as constituting human rights violations.
Instead of acting as an effective deterrent, Guantánamo has become a worldwide symbol of US hypocrisy.