Obama reminded of pledge to close down Guantanamo prison
/Rights groups have called on recently-reelected President Barack Obama to close down the country’s dreaded Guantanamo prison in Cuba, a pledge the chief executive failed to fulfill in his first tenure, and put an end to the US drone attacks abroad.
On Thursday, the activists urged the president to live up to his long-overdue promise and shut down the prison camp where US authorities hold the so-called war on terror suspects.
The rights groups also demanded the president to stop employing his predecessor George W. Bush’s strong-arm security tactics, including warrantless surveillance and extrajudicial killings using the unmanned aerial vehicles.
Anthony Romero, the executive director of American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), said it was time “to once again be a nation where we can be both safe and free.”
“We urge President Obama to dismantle a national security state where warrantless surveillance, extrajudicial killings of American citizens by drones and other attacks on our personal freedoms have been deemed acceptable,” he said.
Amnesty International (AI) also released a strongly-worded statement, describing Obama’s human rights record as “disastrous.”
“Obama now openly embraces the concept of a global 'war on terror' as grounds to override international human rights norms and reinterpret the Constitution,” AI US chief Suzanne Nossel wrote.
Baher Azmy of the Center for Constitutional Rights asked Obama not to follow in the footsteps of his predecessor regarding torture at Guantanamo.
“I hope that President Obama's legacy will not be that he legitimized indefinite detention without charge and made Guantanamo a place where the United States sends Muslim detainees to grow old and die,” he said.
Shortly after his inauguration in January 2009, Obama signed an official order to shut down the prison within a year, describing it as a "sad chapter in the American history."
A total of 779 detainees have been held at the Guantanamo Bay facility since September 11, 2001 attacks, according to Human Rights Watch (HRW) which says 169 still remain in custody at the prison, located in southern Cuba.
