Obama and Guantanamo Bay

In the first flush of presidency, Mr Barack Obama has hit the right note by quashing the pleas of senior US intelligence officials and ordering the closure of Guantanamo Bay, a detention centre which has earned America a black mark of the highest order, within a year. He has barred the CIA from savage treatment of terrorism suspects held there and ordered it to close "as expeditiously as possible" any secret detention facilities overseas and begin straight away compliance with common Article 3 of the Geneva conventions, which prohibits humiliating and degrading treatment of prisoners.
Obama's order envisages the creation of an interagency panel which will review the status of all 240 prisoners in Guantanamo Bay and seek to transfer as many as possible to third countries that will agree to take them. If transfer is not approved, a second review will determine whether prosecution is possible and at what forum. If any of the remaining inmates cannot be transferred or prosecuted, then the review co-ordinated by the attorney general and the defence secretary will look at lawful ways of dealing with them.
The detention camp is a operated by Joint Task Force Guantanamo since 2001 in the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base, which is on the shore of Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. It has become a symbol of the excesses in the War On Terror waged by former President George W Bush. It represents all that is wrong with the US policy and why Americans today are perceived as enemies by Muslims in many places. Persons from Pakistan and other countries incarcerated in the prison have recounted horrible accounts of the torture they have gone through. Sleep deprivation, keeping room temperatures uncomfortably high or low, food deprivation and other techniques designed to inflict maximum psychological damage, have all been a part of this. According to some accounts, the prisoners were incarcerated in underground cells and their knees and back given electric shocks. To crown it all, the US interrogation techniques including "waterboarding or simulated drowning." It was according to August 1, 2002 Legal memo written by conservative lawyers at the Justice Department that the CIA was given carte blanche to use a wide variety of unorthodox techniques including waterboarding against Al-Qaeda suspects.