5th Anniversary of the U.S. Disgrace at Gitmo – My LTTE to Washington Post

January 11th, 2007, marks the 5th anniversary of the arrival of the first of our detainees at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

For a country that prides itself on decency and fairness, our treatment of those detainees has been a national disgrace. The United States was founded upon the concept, proclaimed in our Declaration of Independence, that all men are created equal and thus have unalienable rights. Our Constitution, and especially our Bill of Rights, translated that concept into a government sworn to make the concept into a reality.

Our President has deemed that our detainees at Guantanamo Bay have no rights, calling them “unlawful enemy combatants” to distinguish them from prisoners of war, in an attempt to bypass the Geneva Conventions of 1949. But the absence of prisoner of war status for our prisoners does not give us the right to throw internationally accepted standards of fairness and common decency out the window in our treatment of them. International law (and the law of all civilized societies, including ours) specifies that if a prisoner is not deemed a prisoner of war, then he must be treated as a suspected criminal, with all the rights attendant upon that.

Of the hundreds of detainees that we have imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay, only ten have been charged with a crime. In being indefinitely detained without charges brought against them, we are depriving them of our own Fifth Amendment right to a fair trial. For those who are charged with a crime, we deny them the right to counsel and the right to confront witnesses against them, thus violating our own Sixth Amendment rights. And numerous allegations of torture and unexplained deaths, by the International Red Cross, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and our own FBI, suggest that we deny them our Eight Amendment rights against cruel and unusual punishment. For example, our FBI recently released documents showing that at least 26 of its employees witnessed “aggressive mistreatment and harsh interrogation techniques”, including such actions as beatings, chaining detainees to the floor in a fetal position for extended lengths of time, thus allowing them to defecate and urinate on themselves, exposing them to intense heat and cold, and depriving them of sleep for several days at a time.

Our President has defended this system by claiming that our detainees are terrorists and killers. Whatever happened to the concept of “innocent until proven guilty”? Our government’s own tribunals have already determined that over half of our detainees at Guantanamo Bay never committed a hostile act against our country. Furthermore, over half of them were not captured by us on a battlefield, as our President has claimed, but rather were simply handed over to us by others in return for cash rewards.

There has been no evidence provided to the American public that any of this treatment has resulted in anything of value to our country. To the contrary, such actions disgrace our country in the eyes of the world, thus facilitating the recruitment of thousands of additional anti-American terrorists, and thereby endangering the lives of all Americans.

But beyond that, and more important, these are not the actions of a civilized and moral country. The United States of America should not stand for the abuse of all rights associated with a civilized legal system. It should not stand for torture. For a Presidential administration that claims to base its actions on Christian principles, there is a vast gap between its actions and actions that Jesus would endorse.

Our President should take immediate steps to ensure that the abuse of our prisoners at Guantanamo Bay and elsewhere ceases immediately. And if he refuses to do that, our new Congress should undertake extensive investigations into his administration’s treatment of our prisoners.

In so doing, our government would join with the rest of the civilized world in supporting and promoting the international laws that were designed to make our world a better place. And it would go back to the principles on which our country was founded, to rediscover a respect for fairness, the rule of law, and common decency.