Posting from: Philipsburg, MT
One of the first high visibility items on Obama’s To Do list is closing down Guantanamo. Without any further examination, this sounds great. However, further examination is needed.
Orders on detainee treatment await Obama
Executive orders that would end the network of secret CIA prisons and rewrite how the agency treats terrorism suspects in its custody await Obama’s signature.
Obama was expected on Thursday to sign the orders that would, among other things, shutter the international system of secret CIA prisons and the military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, The New York Times reported.
That sounds encouraging. But wait, there’s more…
Left unresolved, however, are major questions surrounding the closing of the Guantanamo prison, including where and how detainees would be prosecuted if the review determined they should be tried, the Times said.
The orders would permit Obama to reinstate the CIA’s detention and interrogation operations by presidential order, if necessary.
The CIA instituted a network of secret prisons — roundly criticized internationally — in 2002 to house and interrogate senior al-Qaida officials captured overseas. While the exact number of suspects in the system was unknown, outgoing CIA Director Michael Hayden has said the number was “fewer than 100.”
The Obama plan is now starting to sound very bad. He’ll take hundreds of uncharged, untried prisoners from a known facility where there is at least some visibility to the public, and put them where? In fewer than 100 secret prisons possibly still subject to the same detention and interrogation techniques? How is this better than the already attrocious status quo?
Don’t think it will happen? Amy Goodman of Democracy Now raised the flag on this one a couple of months ago:
As Obama Vows to Close Guantanamo, His Advisers Are Reportedly Crafting a Plan to Create a New System of Preventive Detention and National Security Courts
AMY GOODMAN: Explain what you mean by “preventive detention.”
MICHAEL RATNER: Preventive detention is really what we see at Guantanamo. It’s when you are put into a prison without being charged with a crime and without having a trial on that charge. It means you’re put into a prison for national security reasons, because you’re, quote, “dangerous.” And in this case, the proposals that seem to be working together, preventive detention and national security courts, are—yes, we may need to jail people because they are dangerous or national security threats, and even for that, their testing of that preventive detention can’t occur in a regular court, we don’t think they’re sufficient enough, we’re going to set up national security courts to do that.
So what you’re really seeing is a re-wrapping of Guantanamo in a legal—in a legal new paper to make it more palatable. I hope that doesn’t happen. I hope there’s huge objections. The idea that this country would go into a preventive detention at this point and special courts, after we’ve been litigating for years to say these people have a right to get into a federal court and we shouldn’t have a preventive detention scheme, is remarkable to me. And I would just—I would really think that while it’s great that he wants to close Guantanamo and end torture, I mean, to set up an alternate scheme is really un-American.
AMY GOODMAN: The Associated Press is reporting that Obama advisers are crafting a plan that would put the prisoners in US courts. Under the proposal, some prisoners would be freed, while others would be sent to trial in criminal courts in the United States. A third group would go in front of a new court system designed to handle so-called national security cases.
MICHAEL RATNER: You know, at Guantanamo, there’s 255 people. The majority of those just should be released. I mean, that’s clear, if not almost everybody. The rest of them should be tried in federal courts. What this floated piece by the AP report is saying, yeah, we’ll try some of them, we’ll free most of them, but some of them are going to be put in these national security courts and held in preventive detention.
The question is, why? What are we doing here? The reasons they give are, we can’t disclose classified information, and maybe we can’t prove that they actually committed crimes. Well, classified information is dealt with all the time in our federal courts. There’s hundreds of trials in which they have methods of dealing with classified information. The other issue is more serious. Yes, they may only have evidence from torture against some people. Well, that shouldn’t be allowed to hold people in national security courts or in regular courts. In fact, if anything, national security courts and preventive detention, in my view, will encourage torture, because you’ll have special ways of holding people without being able to suppress the evidence. I mean, it’s amazing. What they’re taking is essentially a made-up problem, much like the ticking time bomb, and trying to build an entire superstructure of preventive detention and national security courts on top of it, when we don’t even ever have one of those so-called ticking time bombs.
So even if most of these illegally, unethically detained prisoners are eventually released, what we are looking at here is the possibility that preventive detention will actually be institutionalized in a legally-sanctioned manner for future use against both foreigners and perhaps even United States citizens. This is not the kind of change any of us should support or be happy with.
The day Guantanmo closes- actual sooner, throughout the entire process- we should all be asking whether the location and status of each and every person in Guantanamo today is still accounted for. And we should be asking what is substantively different about the new detention scheme that replaces Guantanamo.
And we should also be asking what Obama plans to do about the tens of thousands of other prisoners being preventively detained by the United States and our allies on our behalf in secret around the world:
Reprieve is delighted to learn that President Barack Obama will close Guantánamo Bay, but urges that time is of the essence
At Reprieve we fight for legal rights in the darkest places. Since 2002 a key battleground has been Guantánamo Bay; we are relieved that this battle is nearly won. We thank the President for his support and will hold him to his promises.
Clive Stafford Smith, Legal Director of Reprieve said “President Obama’s pledge is welcome news, but the prison in Guantánamo must be closed down as soon as possible. Many of the people kept there without trial have lost 7 years of their lives – we should not make that 8.
Sadly, Guantánamo Bay is only the most infamous of the human rights abuses perpetrated by the Bush administration. Reprieve can report that around one hundred times the number of prisoners in Guantánamo Bay are currently imprisoned illegally in US-sponsored prisons and ‘black sites’ around the world. These prisoners are held beyond the reach of lawyers, without trial and without rights. Some are held on ships, some in Africa, many have simply disappeared.
Closing Guantanamo may show commitment to the appearance of change. What is needed is real, fundamental change. If that does not happen, then this is just more of the same old politics as usual dressed up in ribbons and bows and happy faces and rainbows.
Or, even worse, dressed up in doves.