As the last British resident comes home, Guantanamo's legacy continues
At a snail’s pace, Guantanamo Bay is being emptied of its inmates. Around 100 men still remain behind the razor wire. But in the coming weeks its last British prisoner, Shaker Aamer, will be freed from detention, though perhaps not from the nightmares and flashbacks. The infamous prison will reach another landmark on the way towards its likely, eventual closure.
Mr Aamer, a Saudi Arabian national and British resident, has been imprisoned there for more than thirteen years - around the length of a murder sentence - despite being convicted of nothing. Military files disclosed by WikiLeaks claimed he had connections to extremists, but with neither trial nor charge, US authorities have twice ruled that he is suitable for release. For some reason the Americans appear to have stalled and stalled again.
It is perhaps surprising that the facility is still open at all. “I think I would have closed Guantanamo on the first day” President Obama once said - he still hopes to have his way, belatedly. But even then, the legacy of what Joe Biden once called "the greatest propaganda tool that exists for recruiting terrorists" will surely endure.
Guantanamo Bay is the oldest overseas American naval base in world - a US enclave for more than a century. Despite warming relations between Havana and Washington DC, Fidel Castro has said the US presence is “illegal”.
Yes, the Americans send rent cheques, but Cuba refuses to cash them. They see the US military as squatters rather than paying lodgers. And for those who believe American foreign policy is an expression of imperialist ambition, Gitmo is a 45 square mile symbol of that, with a long-term lease attached.
It has had many functions in recent times, but the so-called ‘War on Terror’ gave it a new one - as America’s detention camp for international terrorism suspects. There have been claims that the methods used against its detainees would break American law - and that its very existence has no basis under international law. Its opponents have cited moral, legal and humanisation reasons to call for its closure.
From al-Qaeda’s magazines to ISIL's videos, the alleged torture of Muslim inmates has been an apparent gift to jihadist recruiters and propagandists.
During Shaker Aamer’s missing years, the orange jumpsuits now so familiar to him have been replicated by so-called Islamic State in execution videos - a macabre statement of the tables having turned. They view Guantanamo not as an isolated institution, but as one element of a global narrative encompassing American and British military interventions abroad and demonisation of Muslims at home. The camp, and its methods, have become a reference point for Islamist extremists and jihadist groups seeking to argue that the West is at war with Islam.
Of course it is not only radicals who see Guantanamo that way - far from it. But long after the doors have shut, long after inmates like Shaker Aamer have left, it may be today's most dangerous extremists who remember its legacy the longest.