Indefinite detention without trial and torture have led the operations of this camp to be considered a major breach of human rights by Amnesty International and a violation of Due Process Clause of the Fifth and Fourteenth amendments of the United States Constitution. The camp was established by President George W. Bush's administration in during the War on Terror. His successor, President Barack Obama , promised that he would close it, but met strong bipartisan opposition from Congress, which passed laws to prohibit detainees from Guantanamo being imprisoned in the U.
During Obama's administration, the number of inmates was reduced from about [5] to 41; [6] most former detainees were freed and transferred to other countries. In January , President Donald Trump signed an executive order to keep the detention camp open indefinitely. In May , the first prisoner was transferred during Trump's term; this reduced the number of inmates to At the time of its establishment in January , 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.
The Department of Defense 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. After Bush political appointees at the U. 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.
Supreme Court decisions since have determined otherwise and that U. Rumsfeld on 29 June , that detainees were entitled to the minimal protections listed under Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions. Current and former detainees have reported abuse and torture, which the Bush administration denied.
In a Amnesty International report, the facility was called the " Gulag of our times. 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 22 January , President Obama issued a request to suspend proceedings at Guantanamo military commission for days and to shut down the detention facility that year.
