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Obama’s unfulfilled Gitmo promise
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Five years after his election, the
U.S. President has not closed the prison on the
illegally held Guantánamo Naval Base
Manuel E. Yepe
THE
failure to fulfill electoral promises made by
candidates who win U.S. presidential elections is
not news. In fact, this is corroborated by the
corporate press in that nation.
However, in the case of current President Barack
Obama – whose triumph had much to do with the
relatively daring promises which allowed him to
overcome the odds against him, given his ethnic and
social origins and age, among other aspects – his
failure to meet his promises has placed him in a
position which could prove damaging to the
Democratic Party in the 2016 elections.
One
glaringly evident case little mentioned in the media
is that, during his 2008 presidential campaign,
Obama described the case of Gitmo (as the illegally
naval base is identified in the United States) as “a
sad chapter in American history,” and promised that,
if he were to be elected, the base would closed in
2009.
Shortly after his election, the new president
reiterated his promise to close the base in an ABC
television interview.
However, in November 2009, Obama was forced to
acknowledge that it was not possible to set a
specific date for the closure, while announcing that
it would most likely occur at some undetermined
point in 2009.
On
December 15, 2009, a presidential memorandum issued
by Obama ordered the closing of the prison camp and
the transfer of the detainees to the Thomson
Correctional Center in Illinois. Shortly afterward,
in a letter to Congressman Frank Wolf, who was
making every effort to avoid the transfer of the
Guantánamo detainees to Thomson, U.S. Attorney
General Eric Holder stated that such a move would
violate legal prohibitions which he was determined
to uphold.
And
thus this vacillation has continued to date, in a
clear demonstration of the President’s unwillingness
to confront the issue, despite popular will as
expressed in the elections.
It
should be noted that there has been no media
reference in recent history to the fact that the
base’s very existence is indefensible and that a
genuine solution must include, as a principal step,
the return to Cuba of this occupied territory.
During a workshop with Cuban experts on the 110-year
occupation of Guantánamo by the United States, which
took place recently in Havana, Jonathan Hansen,
associate professor at Harvard’s David Rockefeller
Center for Latin American Studies, affirmed that few
in the United States acknowledge that the base must
be returned to Cuba, and that the problem is how to
make this matter an issue for discussion.
The
United States occupies this portion of Cuban
territory in virtue of an unjust agreement of
indefinite duration imposed on Cuba in February
1903, as one of the addendums to the Platt
Amendment, introduced as an appendix to the
Constitution of the nascent Cuban Republic through
pressure from Washington.
Sooner or later, Guantánamo must disappear and this
ignominious enclave will remain as one more sad page
in the history of U.S. imperialism.
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