[The Guardian, U.K.]

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El Pais, Spain

Guantanamo is Incompatible with President Obama's Principles

 

"Guantanamo prison is incompatible with a country that claims to champion the rule of law. It is one of the greatest failures and profound disappointments of Obama's half-full/half-empty presidency."

 

EDITORIAL

 

Translated By Halszka Czarnocka

 

April 26, 2011

 

Spain - El Pais - Original Article (Spanish)

If Barack Obama wanted to close Guantanamo and needed a further argument to do so, he could have found dozens in documents on the no-man's-land prison that WikiLeaks has divulged - and our newspaper has published. It's a dossier on the infamous prison that keeps operating, despite a solemn presidential promise issued in January 2009 to close it. This is a dossier, the publication of which Washington hastened to condemn invoking some vague damage to its security, as happened before with documents on U.S. foreign policy.

 

The Guantanamo papers, which refer to the period before 2009, shed light on the overwhelming record of abuse and violation of the most basic fundamental rights committed at the prison. Created by George W. Bush in 2002 after the attacks of September 11, the facility exists in a military-administered legal limbo, in which the United States continues to hold over 170 Islamist terrorist suspects. These reports on over 700 prisoners, many of whom were taken to Guantanamo arbitrarily and in some cases held there for nine years, show a typically totalitarian system of incarceration, based on suspicion, speculation and denunciation.    

Posted by WORLDMEETS.US

 

As the WikiLeaks files illustrate, incarceration at Guantanamo has more to do with the probability that an inmate represents a present or future threat to the United States due to his connection to al-Qaeda or the Taliban, no matter if it's remote or credible, than with any legal considerations. This is independent of whether he is guilty of anything or not, something that is demonstrated by the fact that only seven of the detainees have been tried or convicted.

 

The Guantanamo prison is incompatible with a country that claims to champion the rule of law. It is one of the greatest failures and profound disappointments of Obama's half-full/half-empty presidency. The retreat of a president who charmed so many of his countrymen and half the world, particularly the Muslim world, when he proclaimed his determination - “I will not be ambiguous about it, we shall close Guantanamo” -  seems to lend weight to the idea that in the end, the White House doesn't find Bush's creation so abominable. And it adds a dash of irony to Obama’s silence on the unacceptable conditions under which Bradley Manning, the soldier incarcerated for being WikiLeaks' informant, is being kept.

 

The aberration of Guantanamo was reinforced this month by Attorney General Eric Holder, when he announced that Khalid Sheik Mohamed, the mastermind behind September 11, and his most direct accomplices, would not be judged by an ordinary jury on U.S. soil, but by the infamous military commissions under procedures of martial law. The director of the CIA [Leon Panetta] wasn't improvising when he said at Senate hearings last February that, were Osama bin Laden to be captured, he would probably end up in Guantanamo.

 

CLICK HERE FOR SPANISH VERSION

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[Posted by WORLDMEETS.US April 28, 3:05pm]

 







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