The Guantanamo airfare catch is the name for a pair of statutory dead ends John Kiriakou described in January 2026, immediately after setting out a comparable trap in the restoration of felons’ gun rights. Rall had said he loves catch-22s; Kiriakou supplied one from his own field.
Cleared and still held
The first is the position of the detainees at Guantanamo Bay who have been cleared for release. No country would take them — and, separately, Congress defunded the ability to pay for their airfare somewhere.[1] Rall’s response, that somebody should run a GoFundMe for the plane tickets, was the closest the exchange came to a remedy.[1]
The bar on American soil
The second was passed in 2009, under Barack Obama: a law providing that none of them are permitted on United States soil.[2]
Kiriakou then drew out the consequence, which he treats as the reductio. Even if a detainee were found guilty of a crime — which he says they will not be, “because everything they said was was because of torture and nothing can be used against them” — they could not be sent to a United States prison, because they are not allowed on United States territory.[2]
What he takes from it
His summary of the whole arrangement was one word repeated — ridiculous — and the observation that closes the passage is about the origin of the problem rather than its administration: “We kidnapped them and then it’s like, well, we can’t let them here. Like, we stole them from their own country.”[2][3]
The catch belongs with his wider view that the prison’s intractability is not an accident of drafting but the accumulated result of every branch of government preferring the status quo to a decision.