Prisoners of Guantánamo (photo: Shane T. McCoy/US Navy)

This week on CounterSpin: As we pass the grim milestone of 20 years of the military prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, even Michael Lehnert, the Marine general who set the camp up, calls for it to close, says it shouldn’t have opened, that it’s an affront to US values. And yet here we are.

The number of Muslim men and boys in Guantánamo has shrunk from some 800 to 39—that’s meaningful. But when you read an offhand reference to those men as “awaiting justice,” one wonders: What do reporters imagine “justice” might mean to people charged with no crime, deprived of liberty unlawfully for decades, in a place designed to keep them from accessing justice, and to keep anyone else from hearing about them, much less questioning the processes that put them there?

We are a long way from understanding the full meaning of Guantánamo. But we can get the remaining detainees out. Our guest says that’s something that can happen and should happen, now. Pardiss Kebriaei is senior staff attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights and a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. She’ll join us to talk abut how closing Guantánamo is not everything we can do, but it is something we can do, and should.

Transcript: ‘It’s 20 Years of Detention and It Needs to End’

Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent press coverage of Lani Guinier, Desmond Tutu, and Covid and disability.