Closing Gitmo in the American Heart

Robert Koehler

February 14, 2025
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Image by Amy Humphries.

Gitmo, of course!! It’s the freest place “we” have – by which I mean the American government, a.k.a. Donald Trump. No rules apply there, be they international humanitarian law or the U.S. Constitution. It’s a dumping ground, a black hole.

It’s the most secure place for America to hold, as Trump put it a few weeks ago, “the worst criminal illegal aliens threatening the American people. Some of them are so bad we don’t even trust their countries to hold them because we don’t want them coming back.”

His plan is to expand the infamous Guantanamo Bay Detention Center, part of the U.S. naval base in Cuba, which George W, Bush began using as he waged his horrific “war on terror” in the Middle East. He began imprisoning alleged terrorists, often arbitrarily arrested, in a hellhole where they had zero rights. Some are still there, several decades later. Trump’s plan is to expand the detention center to hold 30,000 people, which would be, oh, more than double the size of two unforgettable Nazi concentration camps combined: Dachau and Treblinka.

And these migrants would be stuck there entirely under the control of an American government that has declared them to be the country’s biggest enemy of the moment: the biggest threat to our national safety. No rights for them!

If you want to be a great national leader, this is step one: Create an enemy. Stir fear and hatred, then demonstrate that only you can protect us, by doing what’s necessary: dehumanize, dehumanize, dehumanize. That is to say, keep things simple:  us vs. them. This is what the masses understand, apparently.

Oh God, I don’t believe this at all, but the reality of it seems unshakable – with Trump in the White House, more so than ever. There was a time when I believed we were moving beyond the militaristic simplism of Superpower America, with political hope bubbling all the way up to Barack Obama’s election in 2008. Yeah, the Bush era’s dead! But then . . . wars continued, not much changed. Obama had promised to close the Gitmo prison in his first year. That didn’t happen – and that’s when I started to realize that the progressive movement in this country had no real political traction.

What we have instead is ongoing outrage, fueled by truth and introspection. Trump wants to “make America great again” and keeps ironically raging about the migrant invasion. The days of American greatness for which he’s reaching go well past the civil rights (the “political correctness”) era, past the women’s rights era, past the Great Depression. America’s greatness began with the European invasion of what came to be called the Americas – several hundred years of obliterating native cultures and dehumanizing them as “savages.” Our “greatness” preceded the American revolution and continued well after it.

Trump’s intention to expand the Gitmo prison is symbolic as well as practical: It revitalizes the Bush era war on terror; it brings the war home. Today’s terrorist equivalents are the migrant invaders. If you’re interested in reclaiming the actual history of that period, I recommend the book Witnesses of the Unseen: Seven Years in Guantanamo, written by two Algerian men randomly arrested in Bosnia in 2001: Lakhdar Boumediene and Mustafa Ait Idir. They were falsely accused of being terrorists and spent seven years imprisoned for no reason at Gitmo – pulled away from their wives, their children . . . witnessing, and enduring, horrendous treatment, trapped in the American black hole with zero rights. The book contains fragments of our national history: what we can do in the wake of creating and dehumanizing an enemy.

Some years ago, I wrote about the book, about the hell they endured: “stuffed into cages, interrogated endlessly and pointlessly, humiliated, force-fed (in Lakhdar’s case) . . . and finally, finally, ordered by a U.S. judge to be freed, when their case was at long last heard in a real court and the lack of evidence against them became appallingly clear.” This happened thanks to the unending aid they received from a U.S. law firm that spent more than 35,000 pro bono hours litigating the case.

“The book is the story of the courage it takes to survive.”

As well as alleged terrorists, Gitmo has also long been used to detain immigrants intercepted at sea. At Gitmo, they lacked “access to basic human necessities, appropriate medical care, education, and potable water,” according to the International Refugee Assistance Project. And they had no option to seek asylum in the U.S.

What’s different about the Trump plan, according to PolifiFact, quoted at Al Jazeera, is that the U.S. has never sent people who were detained in the United States to Guantanamo. Those arrested here actually had certain rights and protections – which could essentially disappear at Gitmo. Somehow that seems like the point of it all: Americans first. Americans only!

Progressive sanity will re-emerge politically, or so I believe, but how this will happen is anything but clear. The Republican right has certain serious political advantages, even if their basic agenda has only minority support. The prime advantage is billionaire dollars backing their cause. And, of course, creating an “us vs. them” governing mentality has a lot more immediate impact than addressing the world – even one’s enemies – with empathy, understanding and a sense of connection.

Another difficulty the progressive movement faces is the Democrats, who have drifted ever more centrist-right since the Reagan era, refusing to challenge the Republican agenda head-on and gently cradling the nation’s expanding militarism.

It almost seems like we need to start over: Rosa Parks must refuse to give up her seat on the bus again. What might this mean? If nothing else, the truth about American history must continue to flow and efforts to ban it from libraries and classrooms, to burn it in book fires, must be endlessly challenged. And truth still speaks to us from the mountaintop:

“So even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream. I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.”

Robert Koehler is a Chicago award-winning journalist and editor.

The Commercial Impetus Behind Trump’s Targeting of South Africa

Gerard Boyce

 February 14, 2025
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Photograph Source: U.S. Department of State – Public Domain

Last week, Pres. Trump issued an Executive Order targeting South Africa (SA). In terms of this order, the United States (US) immediately cut all aid to the country and granted refugee status to white citizens of Afrikaner descent. This was ostensibly done because SA had enacted legislation, principally the Expropriation without Compensation Act, which allegedly discriminates against Afrikaner South Africans and had harmed US interests by taking ally Israel to the International Court of Justice on genocide charges against the Palestinian people.

A review of local media commentary and analyses thereon in the days that followed suggests that local analysts accept the reasons that Pres. Trump has put forward for passing this Executive Order although they disagree on the legitimacy of the grounds and the accuracy of the information upon which he based his decision. Indeed, coming as his decision did after the slew of social media posts that Pres. Trump has posted about SA over the years and growing tension between SA and the US government caused by, amongst others, alleged SA military support for Russia in its war against Ukraine, one can detect a certain degree of smugness amongst many self-appointed political pundits and armchair critics of the government who have supposedly warned SA that its policies were on the radar of the US government.

Although some commentators have speculated on the influence which South African born billionaire Elon Musk might have exerted on Pres. Trump, the possibility that factors other than seemingly altruistic diplomatic and humanitarian concerns may be driving Pres. Trump’s decision has not received much consideration, notwithstanding the markedly mercantilist tone which he has struck in pronouncements during the first month of his second term as president. In a bid to address this oversight, the following article explores a possible commercial dimension to this decision. Specifically, it will focus on the possibility that US commercial interests in South Africa’s nuclear industry and the access this could afford to Africa’s potentially lucrative nuclear energy market in future underlies this decision.

Before examining how this Executive Order and the issuing of threats of further action if SA does not reverse its policy course might serve to advance American commercial nuclear interests, it might be useful to recap some broad trends that can be discerned in the African nuclear energy market. Chief of these is the anticipation that the long-promised Nuclear Renaissance may finally be getting underway driven by the need for countries to reduce their carbon emissions and transition their economies away from dependence on fossil fuels for their energy needs. African countries, with their younger growing populations, low energy output and weak economies, in particular, appear to have embraced this solution to reducing their carbon footprint, judging at least by the number of African countries that have either embarked upon nuclear programmes recently (e.g. Egypt) or began planning to establish them in earnest (e.g. Kenya,Ghana).  Nuclear technology vendor countries have, in turn, recognised the increased economic opportunities available in Africa’s nuclear energy sector and have been eager to partner with African countries to help them realise their nuclear ambitions. Subsequently, the African nuclear energy market has become an arena for increased competition and contestation for influence at a time of heightened geopolitical tensions globally. Seen against this backdrop, it is reasonable to assume that strategists would perceive that the US would be able to thwart Russian and Chinese nuclear ambitions and gain an advantage over its Great Power rivals in Africa’s nascent nuclear energy market by securing greater access to BRICS member South Africa’s nuclear energy sector given South Africa’s status as a uranium-producing country with a well-established nuclear industry that has a significant pool of nuclear expertise and skills.

Granted, reasonable objections could be made that developments in the South African energy market do not support this hypothesis. For instance, with state-owned electricity utility ESKOM having apparently brought loadshedding (the euphemism officially used to describe rolling blackouts in SA) under control for the better part of a year and many private companies and individual consumers that can afford it having already migrated off the electricity grid by installing solar electricity for example, the South African government’s appetite for increasing nuclear capacity is likely to have waned. At the political level, support for expanding nuclear power capacity is unlikely to be guaranteed among the reluctant partners that make up the unsteady Government of National Unity that was established last year after none of the political parties managed to secure a majority of votes in last year’s national elections. Coupled with the fact that this controversial decision has been tainted by allegations of bribery and corruption and is thus likely to be met with significant popular opposition despite the expansion of nuclear power capacity being gazetted in the government’s latest (draft) Integrated Resource Plan, all but the most ardent nuclear supporter would be bullish about the prospects of government expanding nuclear power output. Furthermore, even if the South African government did decide to go ahead and expand nuclear power capacity, indications are that BRICS ally Russia has always been the frontrunner to secure any nuclear deal with SA. Therefore, it would appear that there exists little direct benefit for the US to apply pressure on SA in this regard.

Although these objections are valid, they may not be relevant to US nuclear plans given the segment of the nuclear market on which the US appears to be focused and the model of energy service provision it appears to favour. Rather than the large-scale power plants which have traditionally been the focus of nuclear buildouts, the US has been pushing the design and development of small modular reactors (SMRs). Importantly, since they are smaller than traditional nuclear power stations, in terms of output capacity, and estimated to cost substantially less (although disputed), public entities are not the only potential buyers of these reactors. Moreover, since they can be located in remote locations, they do not have to be connected to the public electricity grid, thus enhancing their appeal for use in energy-intensive operations such as mining operations located in countries where electricity supply is often erratic given the poor state of transmission infrastructure.

The US government’s outlook for the nuclear industry happens to dovetail with the needs of the tech entrepreneurs who appear to constitute Pres. Trump’s inner circle. Incidentally, these tech moguls have themselves invested heavily in the development of advanced SMRs to meet the energy needs of the energy-hungry datacentres on which the Artificial Intelligence industry is reliant. Incidentally, they have already raised significant amounts of capital to build nuclear power stations based on SMR designs. Access to South Africa’s nuclear industry would enable them to build out the large energy infrastructure needed to run their datacentres cost-effectively while also enabling them to test and hone their preferred model of independent electricity production before replicating it elsewhere.

In a further twist, Afriforum, the group that has been thrust into the global spotlight because of its central role in this saga following its lobbying on behalf of Afrikaners in the US, and its various partner organisations in SA, e.g. Southern African Agri Initiative (SAAI), are prominent supporters of nuclear power and have long been proponents of SMR designs based on South Africa’s abandoned pebble bed modular reactor design. This group has also partnered with US based organisations that have deep South African links to raise funds in the US for the building and operation of SMRs in SA. Building and operating nuclear power stations that enable users to provide for their own energy needs accords well with this group’s political ideology of a weak central state and the creation of a series of autonomous communities that are generally self-reliant.

All that advancing US government and these parties’ joint interests in this part of the SA nuclear energy market would require is a change in policy on the part of the SA government to permit private electricity consumers to run nuclear power stations for their own electricity needs, not the outlaying of vast sums by a public company to build nuclear power stations using US nuclear technology or a long-term commitment to partner with US nuclear vendors to build and operate these facilities. In a final twist, the South African government is currently in the midst of a major overhaul of its energy policies to facilitate greater private sector participation in its energy sector. Speculatively, these actors may have calculated that the threat of further action from Pres. Trump, e.g. the stripping of South Africa’s benefits under the Africa Growth and Opportunity Act, may be sufficient to force the South African government to placate the US by acceding to their nuclear demands.

It is put to the reader that this background informs Pres. Trump’s recent decision to target SA. Based on this alignment of interests between the US government, tech billionaires and influential Afrikaner lobby groups, it is further asserted that the pressure being applied on the South African government is motivated in significant part by US commercial interests in South Africa’s nuclear energy industry.

Dr Gerard Boyce is an Economist and Senior Lecturer in the School of Built Environment and Development Studies at the University of KwaZulu-Natal (Howard College) in Durban, South Africa. He writes in his personal capacity.