From Andy Worthington Author and Journalist
By Andy Worthington

The delivery of a new “terror suspect” to Guantánamo makes five new arrivals since March. Andy Worthington looks at their stories, and asks what the administration – under pressure in the Supreme Court, and with no functioning “war crimes” trials – thinks it is doing.

Remember ten months ago, when the Democrats, following success in the mid-term elections, briefly held out the promise that they had teeth, and Donald Rumsfeld, the former strong man who had, in his latter days, become a laughing stock, resigned his post as defense secretary? There were, at that time, high hopes that his successor, former CIA director Robert Gates, would take a less bullish approach to Guantánamo than that of his political masters, the lonely Bush and the dominant Cheney cabal. Those with a particular surfeit of optimism even dared to think that, having tackled the tip of the iceberg, the country might then be ready to probe the dark and largely unexplored mass beneath: the network of secret and semi-secret prisons run or maintained by the CIA, or otherwise connected to the agency, which had begun to attract ferocious opposition, not just from human rights groups, but also from major international bodies including the United Nations and the Council of Europe.

Soon after taking office, Gates declared that he wished to close Guantánamo and conduct trials on the US mainland, explaining that, “because of things that happened earlier at Guantánamo, there is a taint about it,” and adding that he felt that “no matter how transparent, no matter how open the trials, if they took place in Guantánamo, in the international community they would lack credibility.” Despite support from Condoleezza Rice, however, who had inherited the State Department’s profound opposition to Guantánamo from the intel-cuckolded Colin Powell, the malignant swamp of Cheneydom was not to be drained. In no uncertain terms, the Vice President and his little puppet boy, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, shut down all discussion of Gates’ plan, and pretended, as ever, that it was business as usual.

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