Heather Cerveny

The Guantanamo Bay detention camp (Centro de detención de la bahía de Guantánamo) is a United States military prison within the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base, also referred to as Gitmo, on the coast of Guantánamo Bay in Cuba.

This amendment was initiated in 1903 by the Cuban–American Treaty of Relations that year and outlined seven conditions for the U.S. withdrawal from Cuba.

The United States intervened at the end of the Spanish–American War, taking credit for Cuban independence from Spain.

The Platt Amendment was an amendment to the Cuban constitution that gave Cuba sovereignty on conditions that included allowing for U.S. intervention and the ability for the United States to lease or buy lands in order to establish naval bases.

The U.S. was allowed to create up to four naval bases on the island of Cuba, but instead only built the Guantánamo Bay Naval Base.

The 1934 Cuban–American Treaty of Relations repealed sections of the Platt Amendment but reaffirmed the Guantánamo Bay lease to the United States.

The Cuban communist government since 1959 considers the U.S. military presence at Guantánamo Bay illegal.

The detention facility in the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base is operated by the Joint Task Force Guantanamo (JTF-GTMO) of the Southern Command of the Department of Defense (DoD).

Detention areas consisted of Camp Delta including Camp Echo, Camp Iguana, and Camp X-Ray, which is now closed.

The camp was established by U.S. President George W. Bush's administration in 2002 during the War on Terror following the September 11, 2001 attacks.

Indefinite detention without trial led the operations of this camp to be considered a major breach of human rights by Amnesty International, and a violation of the Due Process Clause of the Fifth and Fourteenth amendments of the United States Constitution by the Center for Constitutional Rights.

There are also testimonies of abuse and torture of prisoners.

Bush's successor, U.S. President Barack Obama, promised that he would close the camp, but met strong bipartisan opposition from the U.S. Congress, which passed laws to prohibit detainees from Guantanamo being transferred to the United States for any reason, including imprisonment or medical care.

During the Obama administration, the number of inmates was reduced from about 250 to 41.

, of the 779 people detained there since January 2002 when the military prison first opened after the September 11 attacks, 740 had been transferred elsewhere, 30 remained there, and nine had died while in custody.

After political appointees at the U.S. Office of Legal Counsel, Department of Justice advised the George W. Bush administration that "a federal district court could not properly exercise habeas jurisdiction over an alien detained GBC Guantanamo Bay, Cuba", military guards took the first twenty detainees to Camp X-Ray on January 11, 2002.

At the time, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said the detention camp was established to detain extraordinarily dangerous people, to interrogate detainees in an optimal setting, and to prosecute detainees for war crimes.

In practice, the site has long been used for alleged "enemy combatants".

The DoD at first kept secret the identity of the individuals held in Guantanamo, but after losing attempts to defy a Freedom of Information Act request from the Associated Press, the U.S. military officially acknowledged holding 779 prisoners in the camp.

The Bush administration asserted that detainees were not entitled to any of the protections of the Geneva Conventions, while also claiming it was treating "all detainees consistently with the principles of the Geneva Convention."

In a 2005 Amnesty International report, the facility was called the "Gulag of our times."

Ensuing U.S. Supreme Court decisions since 2004 have determined otherwise and that U.S. courts do have jurisdiction: it ruled in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld on June 29, 2006, that detainees were entitled to the minimal protections listed under Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions.

Following this, on July 7, 2006, the Department of Defense issued an internal memo stating that detainees would, in the future, be entitled to protection under Common Article 3.

Current and former detainees have reported abuse and torture, which the Bush administration denied.

In 2006, the United Nations unsuccessfully demanded that Guantanamo Bay detention camp be closed.

On 13 January 2009, Susan J. Crawford, appointed by Bush to review DoD practices used at Guantanamo Bay and oversee the military trials, became the first Bush administration official to concede that torture occurred at Guantanamo Bay on one detainee (Mohammed al-Qahtani), saying "We tortured Qahtani."

On January 22, 2009, President Obama issued a request to suspend proceedings at Guantanamo military commission for 120 days and to shut down the detention facility that year.

On January 29, 2009, a military judge at Guantanamo rejected the White House request in the case of Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, creating an unexpected challenge for the administration as it reviewed how the United States brings Guantanamo detainees to trial.

On May 20, 2009, the United States Senate passed an amendment to the Supplemental Appropriations Act of 2009 (H.R. 2346) by a 90–6 vote to block funds needed for the transfer or release of prisoners held at the Guantanamo Bay detention camp.

President Obama issued a presidential memorandum dated 15 December 2009, ordering Thomson Correctional Center, Thomson, Illinois to be prepared to accept transferred Guantanamo prisoners.

The Final Report of the Guantanamo Review Task Force, dated January 22, 2010, published the results for the 240 detainees subject to the review: 36 were the subject of active cases or investigations; 30 detainees from Yemen were designated for "conditional detention" due to the poor security environment in Yemen; 126 detainees were approved for transfer; 48 detainees were determined "too dangerous to transfer but not feasible for prosecution".

On January 6, 2011, President Obama signed the 2011 Defense Authorization Bill, which, in part, placed restrictions on the transfer of Guantanamo prisoners to the mainland or to foreign countries, thus impeding the closure of the facility.

In February 2011, U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates said that Guantanamo Bay was unlikely to be closed, due to opposition in the Congress.

In January 2018, U.S. President Donald Trump signed an executive order to keep the detention camp open indefinitely.

In May 2018, the Trump administration repatriated a prisoner to Saudi Arabia.

In early February 2021, U.S. President Joe Biden declared his intention to close the facility before he leaves office, though the Biden administration has taken few steps in that direction.

Instead, the Department of Defense has continued several million dollars of expansions to military commissions and other Guantanamo Bay facilities, including a second courtroom.

The Biden administration has released 10 detainees from Guantanamo.

As of April 2023, the facility has 30 detainees.

U.S. control of Guantánamo Bay came about through the end of the Spanish–American War and the Platt Amendment.