We owe these men a reprieve from hell
By Clive Stafford Smith, who represented a number of Guantánamo prisoners through the legal charity Reprieve (THE TIMES, 03/01/09):
For some years now, the British Government has professed the wrongness of Guantánamo Bay. Tony Blair called it an “anomaly”; others were more forthright. Indeed, the Cuban camp that houses about 250 prisoners, without trial or charges after seven years, is a profound exercise in hypocrisy. The West is here to promote the rule of law, proclaimed George Bush with Mr Blair at his side - but don’t ask us to respect it ourselves. Because hypocrisy is the yeast that ferments hatred,…
En 2002 se sabía lo que pasaba en Guantánamo
Por Mariano Aguirre, director del área de paz y seguridad de FRIDE (EL PAÍS, 06/12/08):
El ex ministro de Exteriores Josep Piqué indicó el 3 de diciembre en la Universidad Complutense que en febrero de 2002 él no sabía “lo que iba a pasar en Guantánamo después”. Piqué formó parte del grupo que, según los documentos publicados por el EL PAÍS, decidió que Estados Unidos usara aeropuertos españoles para transportar a prisioneros detenidos ilegalmente en Afganistán hacia la base de Guantánamo. El entonces ministro de Exteriores, al igual que otros funcionarios del ministerio y Presidencia parece que no tuvieron tiempo de informarse…
How to Close Guantanamo
By Jack Cloonan, a former FBI special agent and Sarah Mendelson, the author of the Center for Strategic and International Studies report Closing Guantanamo: From Bumper Sticker to Blue Print (THE WASHINGTON POST, 30/11/08):
Among Barack Obama’s many campaign promises, the one whose fulfillment is anticipated most around the world is the closing of the U.S. detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Not surprisingly, public debate has begun on how to extract the United States from this legal and security quagmire. Sound recommendations include the need for a fresh review of all detainee files followed by a determination of who can be…
Wrenching Choices on Guantanamo
By Benjamin Wittes, a former editorial writer for The Post, research director in public law at the Brookings Institution and the author of Law and the Long War: The Future of Justice in the Age of Terror (THE WASHINGTON POST, 21/11/08):
Secretary of Defense Robert Gates came into office wanting to close the American detention operation at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Nearly two years later, Guantanamo is still there. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has said she wants to close it. Guantanamo will outlast her. Yet, to watch the post-election Democratic triumphalism, you’d think that Guantanamo is as good as shuttered. President-elect Barack Obama has reiterated…
After the Torture Era
By Eugene Robinson (THE WASHINGTON POST, 18/11/08):
“I have said repeatedly that I intend to close Guantanamo, and I will follow through on that. I have said repeatedly that America doesn’t torture, and I’m going to make sure that we don’t torture. Those are part and parcel of an effort to regain America’s moral stature in the world.”
That unequivocal passage from President-elect Barack Obama’s first extended interview since the election, broadcast on “60 Minutes” Sunday night, was a big step toward healing the damage that the Bush administration has done not just to our nation’s image but to its soul.
Amid the excitement…
Free This Detainee
By Ruth Marcus (THE WASHINGTON POST, 09/07/08):
There’s someone I’d like to introduce to President Bush. Also to Chief Justice John Roberts and Sen. John McCain. His name is Huzaifa Parhat, and that get-together might be tricky to arrange. Parhat is also known as ISN (Internment Serial Number) 320 at Guantanamo Bay.
Parhat is Uighur, a Muslim ethnic minority group from western China. He fled China for Afghanistan, and, when the camp he was living in there was bombed by U.S. forces, went to Pakistan. For a bounty, Parhat was turned over to U.S. authorities and shipped to Guantanamo.
He has been held as an…
Occupations abroad always lead to the erosion of liberties at home
By Gary Younge (THE GUARDIAN, 23/06/08):
Before his show trial in Hungary in 1948, Robert Vogeler spent three months in a cell sleeping on a board that hovered just above two inches of water. Day and night a bright light bathed his cell, and even then someone would bang on the wall next door just to make sure he couldn’t get any sleep. “It is just a question of time before you confess,” he said afterwards. “With some it takes a little longer than others, but nobody can resist that treatment indefinitely.”
And so Vogeler, who was arrested for spying, buckled under the…
How to Complicate Habeas Corpus
By Richard A. Epstein, a law professor at the University of Chicago and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution (THE NEW YORK TIMES, 21/06/08):
Last week’s Supreme Court decision in Boumediene v. Bush settled a key constitutional issue: all prisoners detained at Guantánamo Bay are constitutionally entitled to bring habeas corpus in federal court to challenge the legality of their detention.
This 5-4 decision was correct. The conservative justices in the minority were wrong to suggest that the decision constitutes reckless judicial intervention in military matters that the Constitution reserves exclusively for Congress and the president. (Disclosure: I joined in a…
How many innocent people are going out of their minds today?
By George Monbiot (THE GUARDIAN, 17/06/08):
We shouldn’t be surprised to hear that George Bush dined with a group of historians on Sunday night. The president has spent much of his second term pleading with history. But however hard he lobbies the gatekeepers of memory, he will surely be judged the worst president the United States has ever had.
Even if historians were somehow to forget the illegal war, the mangling of international law, the trashing of the environment and social welfare, the banking crisis, and the transfer of wealth from rich to poor, one image is stamped indelibly on this presidency: the…
A Victory for the Rule of the Law
By Eugene Robinson (THE WASHINGTON POST, 13/06/08):
It shouldn’t be necessary for the Supreme Court to tell the president that he can’t have people taken into custody, spirited to a remote prison camp and held indefinitely, with no legal right to argue that they’ve been unjustly imprisoned — not even on grounds of mistaken identity. But the president in question is, sigh, George W. Bush, who has taken a chainsaw to the rule of law with the same manic gusto he displays while clearing brush at his Texas ranch.
So yesterday, for the third time, the high court made clear that the Decider…
Congress’s Guantanamo Burden
By Benjamin Wittes, a former Post editorial writer and a fellow and research director in public law at the Brookings Institution. He is the author, most recently, of Law and the Long War: The Future of Justice in the Age of Terror (THE WASHINGTON POST, 13/06/08):
The key words in Justice Anthony M. Kennedy’s Guantanamo opinion do not involve the history of habeas corpus, the territorial status of Guantanamo Bay or the accountability of the executive branch to the rule of law. They appear on the opinion’s penultimate page and are unlikely to attract much attention amid the chatter the decision has…
The world sees America in the dock
By Bronwen Maddox, chief foreign commentator of The Times (THE TIMES, 13/02/08):
Every time there is a chance for the United States to escape from the trap it has created for itself in Guantanamo Bay, it slams the door shut.
The Pentagon’s decision this week to seek the death penalty for six men it accuses of the 9/11 attacks, and to try them under the hugely disputed version of military courts that it has devised, is one of the stupidest mistakes that the Bush Administration has made.
Everything about Guantanamo is an affront to the values the US says it is defending in…
A Chance to Defend Themselves
By Thomas B. Wilner, counsel of record for Guantanamo detainees in the cases decided in their favor by the Supreme Court in June 2004 and counsel of record for Guantanamo detainees in the cases pending before the Supreme Court (THE WASHINGTON POST, 30/12/07):
The Supreme Court heard arguments this month in cases brought by detainees held at Guantanamo Bay. Media reports noted the complicated legal issues involved, such as whether the Constitution extends beyond sovereign U.S. territory, whether foreigners are entitled to constitutional protections and whether habeas corpus would have been available in a place like Guantanamo some 250 years ago…
Guantánamo by the Numbers
By David Bowker, a lawyer in New York, and David Kaye, the acting director of the Program on International Human Rights Law at the University of California, Los Angeles. They were staff lawyers at the State Department during the Clinton and Bush administrations (THE NEW YORK TIMES, 10/11/2007):
Six years ago this Tuesday, President Bush granted American armed forces sweeping authority to detain and interrogate foreign members of Al Qaeda and their supporters and to use military commissions to try them. By doing so, the president set in motion the creation of military commissions and the detention camp in Guantánamo Bay,…
Going to See a Ghost
By Gitanjali S. Gutierrez, a lawyer at the Center for Constitutional Rights. She represents numerous detainees held at Guantanamo Bay, she also was a member of the legal team in Rasul v. Bush and was the first habeas corpus lawyer to travel to Guantanamo, in 2004 (THE WASHINGTON POST, 15/10/07):
Actually, Majid Khan — whom I represent in my work as a lawyer at the Center for Constitutional Rights– is still very much alive. Yet his legal status as a person entitled to basic rights is under grave assault. You see, Majid is one of dozens of people who have been…
The Detainee Quagmire
By Michael Gerson (THE WASHINGTON POST, 07/09/07):
If the president, the secretary of state and the secretary of defense all want to see the Guantanamo Bay prison closed before they leave office — as they do — why does it remain open?
When asked this question directly, senior administration officials — some of the ones charged with implementing such changes — reveal the difficulties of turning a gesture into a policy.
First, they explain, countries such as Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Yemen, which exported these terrorists, don’t want them back, at least under conditions we find acceptable. America insists that returned terrorists remain under lock…
Pistachios at Guantanamo
By Jackson Diehl (THE WASHINGTON POST, 23/07/07):
Via a monitoring camera, I saw a snippet of an interrogation session here one day last week inside one of the high-security complexes where foreign detainees are held. No faces were visible, but I glimpsed the jingling bracelets, open-toed sandals and skirts of two young women, who were seated in soft leather chairs around a table with a man in prison garb. One woman was the interrogator; the other was a translator. The means of persuasion, apart from the evident feminine charm, was a generous bag of pistachios — a usually unavailable treat.
Yes, I was…
This Guantánamo man may have gained a trial, but it’s not justice
By Kate Allen, the UK director of Amnesty International (THE GUARDIAN, 05/04/07):
The prosecution by a military court last week of the Australian David Hicks had a surface veneer of respectability (Australian’s guilty plea at Guantánamo hearing, March 27). But this was a facade. Yes, Hicks “is the first terror suspect to face prosecution in revised military tribunals established after the US Supreme Court last year found the Pentagon’s system for trying such detainees was unconstitutional”. But that’s a dubious distinction.The Australian government has talked publicly about their satisfaction in getting “this Australian to the head of the queue” for a…
La legalización de la tortura
Por Mariano Aguirre, director del área de Paz, Seguridad y Derechos Humanos de FRIDE (EL CORREO DIGITAL, 04/04/07):
El Tribunal Supremo de Estados Unidos acaba de rechazar que los alrededor de 400 detenidos en la prisión de Guantánamo (Cuba) tengan derecho a ser juzgados por la justicia ordinaria. De este modo permanecerán sin derecho al ‘habeas corpus’, sometidos a juicios sumarios, posiblemente a coacciones físicas y sin estar acusados formalmente de ninguna causa. La medida del Tribunal supone una victoria para el Gobierno de George W. Bush y para los que propugnan que la tortura y los juicios sumarios son necesarios…
Orwell at Guantanamo
By Eugene Robinson (THE WASHINGTON POST, 03/04/07):
Here’s what the Bush administration has done to the values, traditions and honor of the United States of America: An accused terrorist claims he confessed to heinous crimes so that agents of the U.S. government would stop torturing him, and no one is shocked or even surprised. There’s reason to believe, in fact, that what the suspect says about torture is probably true.
There’s also reason to doubt that the suspect — Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, held in U.S. custody without charges for more than four years — is the Zelig-like innocent bystander he claims to be. But…
