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Guantanamo Bay Essay

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Chapter Two: Literature Review

The creation of Guantanamo Bay served the multiple purposes to detain suspected terrorist, to collect probable Intelligence, and to protect citizens from possible further terrorist attacks perpetrated by the detained individuals. The creation of the GTMO detention facilities were born out a perceived necessity to strengthen the United States’ national security after the tragic events of September 11, 2001. However, throughout Guantanamo Bay’s duration as a strategic level detention facility GTMO has fallen under vast amounts of criticism levied from all corners of the world. With the imminent closure of the detention centers at Guantanamo Bay, the closure underlines the bigger issue that a legal alternative …show more content…

In fact, the day before the terrorist attacks, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld gave a speech at the Pentagon detailing that bureaucracy, at the Pentagon, posed a serious threat to the security of the United States, and officials had proposed to transform the department, in order to find cheap alternatives to function better by outsourcing commercially (Zelizer, 2009). However, after the attacks occurred President Bush viewed them as a declaration of war, and leaped over the judicial process to push for the Global War on Terror. This approach included the construction of GTMO, and other detention facilities. The impact of 9/11 forced intelligence agencies to focus on better understanding human intelligence (Homeland Security, 2015). The approach also forced Americans to go directly from a false sense of security, to a hair-trigger alertness. Immediately after the attacks, the general public highly supported any and all action against terrorist groups suspected to be al-Qaeda (Yoo, 2011). This included detention facilities, such as those at Guantanamo Bay, which held hundreds of suspected terrorists, in order to superficially strengthen the U.S. national security initiative, and to prevent further terrorist attacks. The impact of opening and maintaining Guantanamo Bay, meant that terrorists could be captured, and subsequently punished, while also serving as a means to gather human intelligence on possible

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