Pentagon pauses plan to offer Guantanamo Bay detainees coronavirus vaccines

The prospect of 40 Guantanamo Bay detainees, including accused 9/11 ringleader Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, getting vaccinated before many people across the United States generated outrage among Republicans. Medical workers at the high-security prison complex first began vaccinating the approximately 6,000 residents on Jan. 8, and the New York Times reported that detainees might have gained access to the vaccines as early as next week.

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy of California tweeted Saturday that “President Biden told us he would have a plan to defeat the virus on day 1. He just never told us that it would be to give the vaccine to terrorists before most Americans.”

“How the hell does this make sense??” Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas said in a tweet.

“It is inexcusable and un-American that President Biden is choosing to prioritize vaccinations for convicted terrorists in Gitmo over vulnerable American seniors or veterans,” Rep. Elise Stefanik of New York tweeted.

Approximately 780 people have been detained since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks at Guantanamo Bay Naval Base in Cuba, and it is believed that 40 suspected terrorists remain, according to the New York Times Guantanamo Docket tracker.

In the nearly two decades since 19 al Qaeda terrorists crashed hijacked planes into the World Trade Center buildings, the side of the Pentagon, and a field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania, killing nearly 3,000 people, the five men believed to be responsible for the planning and execution of the plot have yet to face a trial.

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, dubbed “KSM” and described as “the principal architect of the 9/11 attacks” in the 9/11 Commission Report, was a close ally of al Qaeda founder Osama bin Laden. Mohammed is being tried in a death penalty case alongside four co-defendants: his nephew, Ammar al Baluchi; alleged 9/11 hijacking trainer Walid bin Attash; 9/11 facilitator Ramzi bin al Shibh; and al Qaeda money man Mustafa al Hawsawi. The defense teams are seeking to throw out confessions that the five men made to FBI “clean teams” at Guantanamo Bay.

The combination of the presiding judge in the 9/11 case abruptly deciding to retire last year and the raging coronavirus pandemic has meant that the Guantanamo Bay war court has not held a hearing since February 2020, and the trial that had been slated to begin jury selection sometime in early 2021 has been repeatedly pushed back. All of the proceedings on the Caribbean island take place at a specialized war court, and Army Col. Douglas Watkins, who last year became the sixth presiding judge in the 9/11 case amid the tumult over who would oversee the proceedings, again delayed hearings in December, lamenting that “the coronavirus Covid-19 pandemic has continued to worsen.”

The 9/11 pretrial hearings were paused in February of last year as the prosecutors and defense teams battled over a variety of legal issues and took testimony related from those involved in interrogating the accused 9/11 plotters, including multiple days of testimony in Cuba by two of the three men known to have waterboarded Mohammed.

Former President Barack Obama promised to close Guantanamo while running for office in 2008, and on his second day in office, he signed an executive order to close it within a year. But he faced opposition from Congress, among other hurdles (including what to do with the dozens of detainees held there), and didn’t deliver on the promise.

Then-candidate Donald Trump promised in February 2016 that “we’re going to load it up with some bad dudes,” which he didn’t do as president. But Trump did sign an executive order in January 2018 asking then-Defense Secretary James Mattis to keep the prison open.

President Biden’s campaign told the New York Times in June that Biden “continues to support closing the detention center” and claimed that the prison “undermines American national security by fueling terrorist recruitment and is at odds with our values as a country.”