Questions Remain as Biden Appoints Special Representative to Transfer Remaining Guantanamo Prisoners

Even if Biden succeeds in what’s being reported as an effort to transfer prisoners from America’s most notorious overseas torture facility, at least four detainees seem likely to remain jailed without charge indefinitely.

The Biden administration has appointed a special representative to oversee the transfers of some of the last prisoners remaining in the notorious Guantanamo Bay detention camp operated by the US government, according to a new report.

Efforts to relocate those imprisoned in Guantanamo will reportedly be led by Tina Kaidanow, the Defense Department’s former director of international cooperation. While Kaidanow was most recently a Pentagon fixture, her career began in Foggy Bottom. Upon leaving the State Department in 2018, Kaidanow was lauded by a State Department official for “officially expanding opportunities for U.S. industry; and helping drive American jobs and innovation through defense trade.”

Of the 36 men who remain detained in the prison camp where the CIA pioneered new forms of torture, 20 are reportedly being considered for transfer to other prisons either within the US or abroad. Another 12 prisoners are either currently on trial or awaiting judicial proceedings.

But questions apparently remain about whether the effort to transfer those still imprisoned can go forward.

Citing “people familiar with the matter,” the Wall Street Journal wrote Saturday that “moving the men out has proven harder than the Biden team expected,” and even if they succeed, “four detainees are being held indefinitely without charge because authorities consider them a security risk.”

The US government has reportedly spent close to $10 billion on the illegal facility, widely condemned as a “torture camp,” which sits on a patch of Cuban land the US military seized by force in 1898 and has occupied ever since.

The judges overseeing the five cases which are currently ongoing are not civilians but rather members of a special military commission established by former US President George W. Bush under military order just two months after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

Unlike a US civilian or military court, only two thirds of jurors – or “commission panel members,” in Guantanamo jargon – need to sign off to declare a defendant guilty. At the outset, the tribunals were seen as so unfair that even the prosecutors privately complained the military commissions were “rigged,” having been packed with “handpicked” members who “will not acquit the detainees.”

Those accused are not permitted to view all the evidence against them, and are only allowed to use military attorneys and the handful of civilian lawyers with the necessary security clearances.

Per the ACLU, “there is no guarantee that, in the unlikely event that a detainee were actually acquitted by a military commission, he would be released from custody,” because rather than designating detainees as either members of a military or civilians, the US labeled Guantanamo prisoners “ unlawful combatants.”