The eternal prisoners are still chained at Guantanamo, 14 years after Obama said it would be closed

On his second day in office, Barack Obama signed an order to close the Guantanamo detention camp within a year.

His decision was applauded worldwide as the military-run detention center in Cuba had come to symbolize the shameful excesses of Washington’s so-called war on terror. Obama had decided that the 19 torture methods used — including waterboarding, sexual harassment and sleep deprivation — were not moral, legal or effective.

But more than 14 years after Obama’s noble declaration, Guantanamo remains open — with 30 prisoners still locked up in the world’s most notorious detention camp.

Among them is Khalid Ahmed Qasim, 46 years old. He has spent almost half his life in hell there. He has endured mental and physical torture, including nearly ten years in solitary confinement, and has been on hunger strike for seven years to protest his innocence, during which he was repeatedly force-fed.

Qasim has never been charged with a crime and has never been tried. Even the authorities who held him accepted last summer that he would be released.

But the wheels of justice turn agonizingly slowly for these last remaining Guantanamo detainees. So last week his British lawyers petitioned President Joe Biden to demand the speedy release of ‘Prisoner 242’, who is stuck in legal limbo because he cannot be returned to war-torn Yemen nor a country can find that is willing to take him.

“When Khalid was cleared for release many months ago, the top six US intelligence agencies essentially agreed with what we’ve been telling them all along — he was never a terrorist as they claimed,” said civil rights attorney Clive Stafford Smith. “But the most cruel thing is that he is now being told that he has been acquitted but cannot leave.”

Qasim is one of the ‘forever prisoners’ – men trapped in the fetid legal quagmire of this prison that tarnishes the US’s reputation and undermines the powerful nation’s proclaimed position as a bulwark of democracy and human rights.

President Obama’s attempts to close it were rejected by Congress. Donald Trump signed an order to keep it open. Biden has again promised to clear it before he leaves office.

Yet the camp, located in a sprawling US naval base spanning 45 square miles in southern Cuba, is against the wishes of the western world’s elected leader. The 30 men from 12 countries held in the cells are guarded by 1,500 soldiers at an estimated cost of around £30,000 per night per prisoner. Many have been incarcerated for more than two decades.

These are the last of the 780 Muslim men who were blindfolded, tied up and flown halfway around the world to be locked up in solitary confinement, beaten, bombarded with heavy metal music, waterboarded, forced into food and sleep deprivation, and sometimes sexual acts. abuse – all in the name of supposedly defending freedom.

Qasim was captured on his first trip abroad when he claimed to be looking for work in Afghanistan. His lawyers say he was tortured and forced to falsely confess to training with Al Qaeda before being sold to the US for a bounty.

In recent years, as the Guantánamo regime loosened up, Qasim learned English and Spanish, took up poetry and became an artist – even using instant coffee to paint a landscape of mountains he remembers from a distant past . “Painting has been my relief,” he wrote in a letter to Biden last year.

Stafford Smith, who has represented 86 prisoners and visited the camp 42 times, said the mental anguish for such prisoners is almost worse than the physical pain of their interrogation. He says 16 have been released for release, but remain there.

Their future depends on the ability and desire of the US government to find suitable countries to host prisoners who cannot return home to countries such as Afghanistan and Yemen. Qasim’s lawyers hope Ireland is a possible destination. This year, one prisoner was sent to Belize, two returned to Pakistan and another repatriated to Algeria.

The last of the 17 British citizens or residents held at the camp – a Saudi national married to a British woman captured by bounty hunters in Afghanistan – was returned to the UK eight years ago.

Only one current inmate has been convicted, while ten others await trial, including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged mastermind behind the September 11 attacks. Since the camp opened, only eight men have ever been convicted over the years – and four of those sentences have been overturned.

Earlier this year, Fionnuala Ni Aolain, a Belfast law professor who serves as a United Nations Observer on Human Rights, was given unprecedented access by the Biden administration as the first UN official to enter the facility. She was the first independent person some inmates had met in 20 years, but every inmate told her she had arrived too late. “They were right,” she told me. “These are all torture victims we failed.”

Her 23-page report argues that Guantanamo’s systematic use of torture was not only a terrible stain on America’s reputation, but also a “betrayal” of the rights of the families of the 9/11 victims she met before leaving the camp. visited. “The drive for justice was taken away from them through torture, because all the evidence was contaminated and so could not be used,” she said.

The CIA’s torture program, based in part on research into dogs receiving electric shocks, was devised by two psychologists. Navy lawyers serving at Guantanamo included Ron DeSantis, Trump’s rival for the Republican nomination for next year’s presidential election. One prisoner claims he wore a hood, was kept naked, hung from the ceiling, starved, and had his head repeatedly slammed against the wall.

Another, a courier for Al Qaeda, described being beaten, sexually assaulted, dunked in icy water, and had food puree forced into his rectum.

Ni Aolain says the vast majority of the men were taken there for no reason and have no connection to the “crimes against humanity” committed on 9/11, yet every prisoner suffered intense psychological and physical trauma.

Some of the abuse continues. Ni Aolain said each prisoner was handcuffed when they were brought to her, which is not even standard procedure for convicted terrorists. Her report noted that “inappropriate use of restraints and solitary confinement procedures” are still being used.

The Mail on Sunday’s famous front page article in January 2002 headlined ‘Tortured’, which showed handcuffed prisoners in orange uniforms arriving at Camp X-Ray without sight, sound, smell and touch, sparking worldwide outrage. These “illegitimate combatants” were neither subject to US courts nor protected by the Geneva Conventions. Military commissions, later set up to provide a veneer of justice, were hampered by the impermissibility of evidence obtained through torture.

After some US politicians tried to stop the transfer of these detainees to US soil, Obama – and now Biden – had to find other administrations to take in detainees who have not been charged. There is little doubt that many innocent men were dragged into the dragnet or sold for bounties after being beaten for confessing terrorist ties. More detainees have died in the camp than convicted of terrorism.

Among those early captives was Mohamedou Ould Slahi, a Mauritanian who spent 14 years in Guantanamo. I first met him two years ago after he wrote Guantanamo Diary, a scathing account of his treatment that was turned into a poignant film called The Mauritanian. He was finally released in 2016 — six years after a federal judge first ordered his release.

Now 52, ​​he says, “I’m shocked and saddened to know that this place still exists.” He endured extensive torture, including head-butting and drinking water until he vomited.

This torture was designed to force a confession of nonexistent ties to the 9/11 murders. He had briefly fought with Al Qaeda and the Mujahedin in Afghanistan nearly a decade earlier, but on the same side as US interests. Yet this son of a camel herder – a thoughtful man who speaks four languages ​​– is a forgiving character.

He tells me he loves American people — his son is now a U.S. citizen — and sees no point in bitterness. Inevitably, he suffers from post-traumatic stress. But his biggest fear is that the US’s actions at Guantanamo have given the go-ahead for repressive regimes to commit atrocities while masquerading as democracies fighting terrorism.

But all the while, the shame of Guantanamo drags on as Khalid Ahmed Qasim clings to the hope of finally achieving his freedom. “I don’t know where I’m going or what I’m going to do,” he wrote to President Biden. “But there is another life for me outside this prison.”