Guantanamo closure hopes fade as prison turns 10

The Guantanamo Bay detention camp is an extrajudicial detainment and interrogation facility of the United States located within Guantanamo Bay Naval Base, Cuba.

· The facility was established in 11 January 2002 by the Bush Administration to hold detainees from the war inAfghanistan and later Iraq.

· The detainment areas consist of three camps: Camp Delta (which includes Camp Echo), Camp Iguana, and Camp X-Ray, the last of which has been closed.

· The facility is often referred to as Guantánamo, G-Bay or Gitmo, after the military abbreviation GTMO for the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base.

· After the Bush administration asserted that detainees were not entitled to any of the protections of the Geneva Conventions, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld in June 2006, that they were entitled to the minimal protections listed under Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions.

· Following this, on July 7, 2006, the Department of Defense issued an internal memo stating that prisoners would in the future be entitled to protection under Common Article 3.

· On January 22, 2009, the White House announced that President Barack Obama had signed an order to suspend the proceedings of theGuantanamo military commission for 120 days and that the detention facility would be shut down within the year.

· On January 7, 2011, President Obama signed the 2011 Defense Authorization Bill which contains provisions preventing the transfer of Guantanamo prisoners to the mainland or to other foreign countries, and thus effectively stops the closure of the detention facility.