Guantánamo Bay is Here to Stay: My Own Personal Disappointment in the Obama Presidency.

By Elliott Banuelos on February 1, 2013

This is not going to be your typical article pointing out who was responsible, all the committees involved, and where we should hang the blame. For those of you that have been closely following the Obama presidency since its start in 2008, you can probably see where I’m going with this.

As hope and change swept the nation, the calling for new flesh grew: we had a younger man coming in with talks of much needed radical change and attention to issues that have been damaging the reputation of the United States all across the nation. The Bush Era was over, the fear still lingering in the air as we had looming, incredulous debt, ignoramus Islamaphobia, establishment issues in the Middle East, and war crimes tied to the heinous innocent killings and invasions that took on in the Iraqi war.

The Democrats went wild and lobbied hard for this hope and change. I made phone calls, went house to house, discussed and brought awareness to my high school–a 14-year-old was into politics when a time called for it. It was a big change.

But it seems as though these past four years, we haven’t gotten the change we aimed to see. Not to completely demolish the blame of the Republican majority in the House or Senate (and their rather not-so-much internalized racism, either), but it has left leftists, democrats, and independents alike wondering: where the hell is this presidency going?

In recent news taken from The New York Times, it seems that the efforts of the Obama Administration to close Guantánamo Bay is taking a huge step back.

For those of you that aren’t familiar with the practices that go on in the detention camps, Guantánamo Bay is well known for detainment of prisoners suspected of having ties to terrorist groups (and you can be detained just based off of the color of your skin, or lose ties to people who know other people, who are related to another person, who’s the daughter of some ex-terrorist guy and STILL get detained) without due process. In the attempts to trying to get information, there are constant reports of torture and degradation of detainees by Americans (example: urinating on them, ‘waterboarding‘, sexual assault and humiliation, mock executions, the use of dogs to scare detainees, temperature extremes, etc – all taken from The Justice Campaign).

In 2009, President Obama signed an executive order to close down Guantánamo Bay. As a person who holds human rights to an incredibly high regard, I am very disappointed in my country.

For more information, you can listen to this NPR podcast that goes more in depth.

What do you think about Guantánamo? Is the U.S. right in using these torture tactics, and why? Are you disappointed in the Obama Presidency? What do you think?

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