Sasha Pfeiffer
speaker
350 appearances
23 recordings
3 series
first heard Jan 2025
last heard 21 Aug
Sasha Pfeiffer’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 13 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 5.
Appearances
had to negotiate with another country to take them. Finally, Oman agreed to do that. It says it will give them jobs, housing, other supports. Some of them will be monitored for security reasons and also face travel restrictions. And for Guantanamo, the end result is just 15 prisoners are held there now.
And it really has been a flurry. You know, in recent weeks, four other Guantanamo prisoners were released. We know of at least one more transfer in the works. This is partly Biden racing to fulfill his goal of closing Guantanamo. A less charitable view is that it would have taken more political courage to do this when he was not a lame duck.
But now that he's on his way out, it's easier to do hard and controversial things. I do want to note that yesterday's 11 prisoner transfer almost happened in October 2023, but it was called off after the October 7th Hamas attack because some members of Congress were worried about Mideast stability. So finally, in these final weeks, that plan got resurrected. It's also motivated by Trump returning.
Trump has said he wants to keep Guantanamo open. So the assumption is that once Trump is back in the White House, there may be no more Guantanamo transfers under him. And Michelle, at some level, it's also Biden acknowledging that Guantanamo has been a failed legal system. As you know, there's still been no 9-11 trial more than two decades after the September 11th, 2001 attacks.
There's worldwide criticism of Guantanamo as a human rights embarrassment because of the unlawful detention happening there. It's also really expensive, $15 million per year per prisoner. That is way more than a federal supermax. It's as Biden saying, it's time to shut the place down.
So what's been the reaction to this? It tends to be predictable along party lines. Republicans claim this is like releasing terrorists. Democrats say this should have happened a long time ago. It's a moral stain on America, they say. This is complicated by the new fresh upheaval in the Middle East because there's some concern these men could end up back on a battlefield somewhere.
But remember, national security officials has made the decision these men no longer pose a significant threat. I got a more hybrid or nuanced view from Scott Rehm of the Center for Victims of Torture. He's glad the men were released, but he says it could and should have happened sooner.
And he says because it didn't happen sooner, time is now running out on transferring others before Trump comes into office.
The prison and the military court were set up to prosecute suspected foreign terrorists after the September 11, 2001 attacks. The first prisoners arrived in January 2002. Over the years, a little under 800 people have passed through there. Most were never charged, yet held for years. The majority were eventually repatriated to their home countries or resettled in other countries.
There are now 15 left, all of them racing the clock as Trump is about to get into office. And the commonality among the 15 left is that if you're not out by January 20th, you're expected probably not to get out. That is NPR's Sasha Pfeiffer. Sasha, thank you.
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