End the Disgrace of Gitmo
Most of Bush's prisoners are victims, not perpetrators of terrorism
By the Los Angeles Times editorial board
First published February 14, 2006
These aren't our conclusions. They are those of a recent United Nations inspection team that spent 18 months investigating conditions at Gitmo. It's not necessary to endorse all of its recommendations — and it's hard to see how shutting down Gitmo would make the Bush administration any more amenable to respecting human rights and international conventions against torture — to observe yet again that the prison is a global embarrassment that does the U.S. more harm than good in the fight against terrorism.
In a report, revealed Monday by Times reporter Maggie Farley, the U.N. team found that conditions at the prison regularly violate international law. The detainees, captured abroad since 2002 in Afghanistan and elsewhere, were said to be enemy combatants picked up on battlefields. President Bush and his senior staff have consistently called them terrorists and soldiers who needed to be removed from the field of battle. They justify the prison as "a military necessity" and note that enemy combatants can be held without charges for the duration of hostilities.
Yet the U.N. team found little sign that any U.S. officials ever tried to determine whether the men were actually enemy combatants. The team also rejected the notion that a war on terror constituted continuing hostilities.
It is becoming evident that the majority of the men held in Guantanamo were not, in fact, captured in battle. A study of individual detainee cases published recently by the National Journal argued persuasively that more than half of the detainees currently in Guantanamo were abducted in the mountains of Pakistan by warlords who handed them over to U.S. forces for cash rewards, sometimes $1,000 a head. At a time when U.S. forces were unable to find Osama bin Laden, and were desperate to find enemy soldiers in the mountainous caves of Pakistan and Afghanistan, tribal informers apparently had a field day pointing to their own enemies as a way to supply human chattel, who ended up in Guantanamo.
Many of their individual case files suggest that government lawyers felt pressured to find, or invent, evidence that detainees actually knew something about Al Qaeda operations. One Yemeni prisoner was interrogated so roughly that, according to the National Journal, he finally said in exasperation, "OK, I saw Bin Laden five times: three times on Al Jazeera and twice on Yemeni news." His "admission" was duly recorded in a case file: "Detainee admitted to knowing Osama bin Laden."
His case is not uncommon. For detainees at Guantanamo, legal proceedings appear to resemble Salem witchcraft trials. Presumption of guilt and tarring by association abound, while the rules of evidence are perfunctory. These are not the American values our soldiers are fighting for.
© 2006 Los Angeles Times
Go to Home Page
Each week we review dozens of articles and essays from both corporate and independent media sources and choose one that we believe brings you unique or important information or perspectives on issues of democracy and corporate power. Opinions presented do not necessarily reflect those of ReclaimDemocracy.org.Index of past features
Fair Use Notice
This site occasionally reprints copyrighted material, the use of which
has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner.
We make such material available in our efforts to advance understanding
of issues. We believe this constitutes a 'fair use' of any such copyrighted
material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In
accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this
site is available without profit. For more information go to
: http://www4.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.html.
If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes
of your own that go beyond 'fair use', you must obtain permission
from the copyright owner.
