Gitmo prisoners: Exceptional justice from the exceptional US

http://rt.com/op-edge/164216-gitmo-shaker-aamer-us-justice/



Gitmo prisoners: Exceptional justice from the exceptional US
John Wight
Published time: June 06, 2014 13:47

Shaker Aamer is a Saudi citizen with UK legal resident status – married to a British citizen with four British children. He has been held in captivity by the Americans at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba for 12 years.

In that time he has never been charged with any crime and has been cleared twice for release, with the stipulation that he be sent back to Saudi Arabia and not the UK. His legal team have refused to accept this condition, claiming that he will face torture in Saudi Arabia. In the week in which five ranking members of the Taliban were released from Guantanamo in exchange for US Army Sergeant Bowe Berghadi, held prisoner in Afghanistan for five years, we are entitled to ponder what qualifies as justice in Washington?

Many of us still recall the fanfare with which President Barack Obama pledged to close the US detention facility at Guantanamo Bay at the start of his first term as president in January 2009. Yet over five years on the facility still holds captive 78 human beings who, like Shaker Aamer, have been held for 12 years or more and who have been cleared for release. Those 78 make up just over half the 149 detainees that are still being held at Guantanamo.

Though commentators are now speculating that the release of five Taliban militants paves the way for the eventual release of the last remaining detainees at the facility, its existence as an extralegal US detention facility on the island of Cuba has already exposed the existence of the most profound hypocrisy and cruelty at the heart of the US establishment. If any other country in the world operated such a facility outside its own borders, the United States would be first in line to denounce it, demand its closure, and hold the government concerned to account under international law - on the basis that its detainees are being held there in a state of legal limbo, denied both the rights enshrined in the US Constitution, due to the fact they are being held outside the US itself, or the rights of prisoners of war enshrined in the Geneva Convention.