GUANTANAMO BAY
The Neverending Story
Yesterday, the New York Times and
other news outlets reported
on a "trove of more than 700 classified military documents" that
provide "new and detailed accounts of the men who have done time at the
Guantánamo Bay prison in Cuba, and
offers new insight into
the evidence against the 172 men still locked up there." The documents
were obtained by the open government website WikiLeaks but obtained by
the Times through another source. The documents reveal details about
detainee behavior and treatment, but are "
silent about the use of the harsh interrogation tactics
at Guantánamo -- including sleep deprivation, shackling in stress
positions and prolonged exposure to cold temperatures -- that drew global
condemnation."
THE DETAILS:
The Times
editorializes today
that the documents serve as "a chilling reminder of the legal and moral
disaster that President George W. Bush created" at Gitmo and "describe
the chaos, lawlessness and incompetence in his administration's system
for deciding detainees' guilt or innocence and assessing whether they
would be a threat if released." "Innocent men were picked up on the
basis of scant or nonexistent evidence and subjected to lengthy
detention and often to abuse and torture," the Times editorial notes,
adding that
suicides there "were regarded only as a public relations problem.&
quot; The documents show that there were 158 detainees "who did not
receive a formal hearing under a system instituted in 2004. Many were
assessed to be 'of little intelligence value' with no ties to or significant
knowledge about Al Qaeda or the Taliban." The Guardian notes that 212
Afghans at Gitmo were either "
entirely innocent,"
"mere Taliban conscripts" or "had been transferred to Guantanamo with
no reason for doing so." Among inmates who proved harmless were an
89-year-old Afghan villager,
suffering from senile dementia, and a 14-year-old boy who had been an
innocent kidnap victim. The so-called 20th 9/11 hijacker, Mohammed
Qahtani, "
was leashed like a dog,
sexually humiliated and forced to urinate on himself." And U.S. forces
held Sami al-Hajj, a Sudanese cameraman for Al-Jazeera, for 6 years
before finally letting him go. Hajj had insisted he was just
a journalist and he went back to work for Al-Jazeera after his release.
DOUBLE GUANTANAMO?:
The idea of Guantanamo has become so toxic internationally that even military
leaders such as Gen. David Petraeus want it shut down. "Gitmo has caused
us problems,
there's no question about it,"
Petraeus said in 2009, adding, "I oversee a region in which the
existence of Gitmo has indeed been used by the enemy against us." Yet at
the same time, others sing Guantanamo's praises. Former Massachusetts
governor Mitt Romney (R), who will likely run for president next year,
said in his last campaign for the White House that
the prison needs to be expanded,
not closed. "I want them on Guantanamo, where they don't get the access
to lawyers they get when they're on our soil. I don't want them in our
prisons, I want them there," Romney said during a 2007 presidential
debate. "Some people have said we ought to close Guantanamo. My view is
we ought
to double Guantanamo," he later added.
FAILING TO CLOSE GITMO:
Just three years ago, closing the Guantanamo Bay prison had broad bipartisan
support. While Obama campaigned on closing Gitmo, even Republicans, including
President Bush and Obama's opponent, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), agreed. But
Attorney General Eric Holder's recent announcement that alleged 9/11
mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohammed would be tried in a military tribunal
instead of a civilian court all but ended any hopes that the prison would be
closed anytime soon. Yet, as the Washington Post
chronicled last weekend,
"For more than two years, the White House's plans had been undermined
by political miscalculations, confusion and timidity in the face of
mounting congressional opposition." Who's fault is it that Gitmo is
still open? While Democrats in Congress largely abandoned the President,
the White House didn't exactly put a lot of political capital on the
line either. As former White House counsel Greg Craig noted, "There was a
real serious problem of coordination in this whole thing." Indeed, the
administration had planned to transfer some uncontroversial detainees to
Northern Virginia but abandoned the move at the last hour after Rep.
Frank Wolf (R-VA) discovered that Gitmo detainees would be moving to his
district. The White House never cleared their plan with Wolf. Since
then, as Obama noted last year, Gitmo has "been subject
to a lot of...
pretty rank politics."
And as "Not In My Backyard" cries from members of Congress intensified,
the legislative branch eventually cut off funds to close Gitmo and
approved a measure to bar any detainees from being relocated to the
United States.
