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Resuming a project begun under the Obama administration, following a review process, President Joe Biden will seek to close the Guantánamo Bay Detention facility, opened in January 2002 to hold people suspected of ties to al-Qaida and the Taliban.

A total of 780 prisoners have passed through Guantánamo, and the 40 remaining include alleged Sept. 11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and his four co-defendants. About a quarter of the remaining prisoners are facing criminal charges in various terrorism cases, but most of the others have never been charged and are being held indefinitely. Guantánamo has cost U.S. taxpayers more than $6 billion despite finalizing only one conviction in nearly two decades.

Biden’s options are limited without help from Congress. In 2015, Congress passed, and Obama signed, with objections a National Defense Authorization Act—the annual bill that sets the budget for the Pentagon—that included provisions barring the transfer of detainees from Guantánamo to the U.S. This transfer restriction has continued in subsequent NDAAs. 

Even though the Democrats have Senate and House majorities, it will be difficult for Biden to close Guantánamo. Under Obama, a number of key Democrats opposed transferring detainees even to supermax prisons or military brigs on U.S. soil because they fear it would be a threat to Americans. Yet, a number of dangerous criminals in the supermax prison in Florence, Colorado, include Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman, the leader of Mexico’s Sinaloa drug cartel; Terry L. Nichols, Oklahoma City bomber/domestic terrorist, serving 161 consecutive life sentences; Ramzi Yousef and Mohammed Salameh, two of the 1993 World Trade Center bombers serving two life sentences; Ted John Kaczynski, aka the “Unabomber,” serving eight life sentences; Dzhokhar A. Tsarnaev, aka the Boston bomber; and Mamdouh Mahmud Salim, al-Qaida cofounder, serving a life sentence. No one has ever escaped from this prison. 

During World War II, the U.S. housed, fed, and worked over 425,000 German POWs in 700 camps in 46 states with little or no risk to the populace. Most of the camps were low to medium security camps, not prisons, although some of the camps had to be designated “segregation camps,” used to separate the Nazi “true believers” from the rest of the prisoners.  

The Guantánamo Detention Facility should be closed. Its very existence undermines U.S. credibility. On the 19th anniversary of its establishment on 11 January, 2002., United Nations human rights experts stated that the U.S. must immediately close the facility: “Guantánamo is a place of arbitrariness and abuse, a site where torture and ill-treatment was rampant and remains institutionalized, where the rule of law is effectively suspended, and where justice is denied.” 

If the Guantánamo Bay Detention facility is closed down, why not return Guantánamo to the Cubans? Consider that the U.S. occupation of Guantánamo dates back to the passage of the Platt amendment to a U.S. Army Appropriations Bill of 1901, which gave the U.S. the right to intervene militarily in Cuban affairs whenever the U.S. decided such intervention was warranted. Cubans were given the choice of accepting the Platt Amendment or remaining under U.S. military occupation indefinitely. The U.S. has intervened militarily in Cuban affairs at least three times. U.S. intervention endowed Cuba with a series of weak, corrupt, dependent governments until the triumph of the Cuban revolution in 1959. In 1903, the U.S. used it to obtain a perpetual lease of Guantánamo Bay, a blatant example of U.S. gunboat diplomacy. The current Cuban government consider the U.S. presence in Guantánamo to be illegal and the Cuban-American Treaty to have been procured by the threat of force in violation of international law.  

Clearly, the Guantánamo Bay Detention facility should be closed but Biden’s task in accomplishing this will be a daunting one.