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."
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.