Fall 2009 Critical Thinking Student Sample Work

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Practice Recon #1

Student #1

Reconstruction - Closing Guantanamo will be a mistake

The author of this article argues that Obama’s executive order to close Guantanamo Bay will be a mistake. Her main rationale to support this claim was that the assumptions of the prison being unsecured, poorly maintained, and will resolve the torture prisoners endured are not accurate. She supports this by illustrating her visit to the prison. When she went to Guantanamo proved to be a “state-of-the-art, climate-controlled, clean facility.” Moving detainees to another prison location, for example, Camp X-Ray may be much worse as the facility has not been in function in the past years based on her research. Therefore, keeping the detainees at Guantanamo would better since it is the best they have. She disproved the assumption that Guantanamo was a threat to national security by witnessing that there was tight security over the detainees as she saw security guards checking on them every three minutes. She explains that it would be more dangerous to move the location of the prison and moving the prisoners, first because another location would make it more for a target for terrorists. Guantanamo’s location at the tip of Cuba makes the prison geographically isolated. The movement of detainees does not change the horrors that may or may have not happened in the prison. The torture of prisoners that occurred in Abu Ghraib is similar to that of Guantanamo, therefore the location of the prison does not change what did and can happen in other prisons. The trials for suspects may never happen because the transferring to a different prison will only delay it, already since the most highly secured, most technologically advanced courtroom in the world has already been built at Guantánamo.