The 14th Annual Day of Scholarship was organized by the Grants Office on March 19th and 20th 2014. The event wasn’t advertised that well but I happen to know about it from Stockton’s Honors page.
The event had presenters (who were students and faculty at Stockton), who would present for 30 minutes on their respective topics. I couldn’t go on the first day so went to the event on 20th March at 11:30 pm. It was a presentation on Guantanamo Bay Detainees & Predictors of their Release by Susan Fahey, who had done a paper on that topic. All the students who attended that presentation were either a criminal justice major or communication major, so being a Biochemistry major I felt a bit weird. But apparently I learned a lot about Guantanamo Bay (GTMO).
Being one of the two persons in the room who had no prior knowledge about (GTMO), Fahey introduced the GTMO. GTMO is a naval base in Cuba which is used by US as a detention facility. The government doesn’t share information about the detainees detained at the GTMO. As of January 2002 (when the GTMO started as a prison) there were about 779 prisons in there. Most of the detainees are from Afghanistan or Al Qaeda. There are also prisoners from the Iraq War.
About 150 prisons are still left in the dentition center today. These people are considered to be very dangerous to be released. These are all high value detainees who supposedly have a lot of information that can be used by U.S. officials for the country’s security. The main controversy behind releasing these detainees is that, if they return to their respective countries the likelihood of them being attacked by other fellow citizens is very high. Also, all these detainees have been in prison for a very long time, so they have lost contact with their families. Also, the detainees who are detained in the facility are not guaranteed to be involved in a terrorist activity.
Also, the risk factor of these detainees was determined on how dangerous they are too the U.S. and its allies. Information about all the detainees was relapsed was by the N.Y.T. The newspaper strongly claims that they didn’t obtain the information from the wiki leaks. But, there is no proof showing that the information they published was leaked through wiki leaks. So, Fahey said the credibility of the data available for the GTMO detainees available is cannot be trusted blindly.
In that 30 minutes presentation, I learned a lot about the GTMO. When I walked in the room for the presentation I had no idea about the subject being presentation, but after presentation I obtained a lot of new information. In all it was good presentation, I wished I could go to more of the presentations but due to time clashes I couldn’t.