Barack Obama campaigned on a pledge to close the terrorist detention facility at Guantanamo Bay. Since then, he seems to have backed off; maybe he has listened to the Gitmo prisoners who don’t want to leave:
The Obama administration would quickly send home six Algerians held at the military detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, but for one problem: The men don’t want to go. Given the choice between repatriation and incarceration, the men choose Gitmo, according to their lawyers.
The detainees fear that they might be tortured or killed if they return to Algeria. Which is to say, actually tortured, something that has never happened at Gitmo, notwithstanding the global hyperventilation of the last seven or eight years.
Administration officials point out that despite this history, the United States, under the Bush and Obama administrations, has already sent 10 Algerian detainees home from Guantanamo Bay, and that none has been persecuted.
But that isn’t enough to persuade these detainees to leave Cuba:
The administration has been preparing to repatriate one of the six Algerians. But lawyers for Aziz Abdul Naji, 35, who has been held at Guantanamo for more than eight years, said he is “adamantly opposed to going back.”
“It would be outrageous and inhumane to take him against his will,” said Doris Tennant, one of his lawyers.
As people used to say in a very different context: only in America.
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