“Essentially, we have shaken the belief that the world had in America's justice system [with Guantanamo] . . . and it's causing us far more damage than any good. . .”, said former secretary of state Colin Powell on the Guantanamo Bay Detention Camp. The camp has hurt America’s worldwide standing and committed so many war crimes that they have outweighed any information that might have been gained from torture. The Guantanamo Bay Detention Camp is a U.S. military prison in Guantanamo Bay in south-east Cuba. It is used to hold people that the U.S. Government has indefinitely detained without trial for suspicions of terrorism. On the occasions that the detainees do get trials, they almost exclusively get military commissions, a type of military trial more skewed towards the prosecutors than a normal U.S. civilian trial. The base was originally created in 1901 as a place to project military power over Cuba, with the plan of possession of Cuba. The U.S. pays very little to rent the base, only $5000 annually (Tom Hayden). and Cuba hasn’t exactly agreed to the deal, protesting by having not cashed any of the checks since 1959. Taking in detainees starting in early 2002 at the dawn of the War on Terror, it has been the target of many torture accusations. Recently, the CIA released a report confirming that many types of torture were practiced there, including, but not limited to, water boarding, nakedness, extreme cold, slapping, beating, loud noise, forced rectal bleeding, threats, sleep deprivation, and placement in stress positions. The torture and interrogation techniques used at Guantanamo Bay often has not yielded any information about other terrorists, as it was supposed to do. Said Captain John Carr, a former prosecutor in military commissions: "When I volunteered to assist with [military commissions] and was assigned to this office, I expected there would at least be a minimal effort to establish a fair process and diligently prepare cases against significant accused. . . Instead, I find a half-hearted and disorganised effort by a skeleton group of relatively inexperienced attorneys to prosecute fairly low-level accused in a process that appears to be rigged…”. With its unfair system of military commissions, Guantanamo Bay, has trapped hundreds of possibly innocent people in prison, and has been the home of a myriad of egregious human right abuses; there are, however, steps that can be taken by international community, NATO, Cuba, and the U.S. legislature towards ending the human rights abuses and affording the detainees decent, fair trials. Part of America’s international standing can be repaired, and a failed branch of the War on Terror can be confined to history.

By convincing NATO that Guantanamo Bay is a colony in that the U.S. essentially forces Cuba to rent the land from them for almost no money, NATO might urge the U.S. to move or end the base.