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How Guantanamo Can Be Closed

By Alexa

Have I told you lately that when Andy Worthington has something to say, I'm gonna listen? Mr. Worthington, author of The Guantanamo Files, an extraordinary compendium of biographies of 774 illegally detained individuals of Bush's War on Terra, is a journalist and historian, whose work is often featured at Huffington Post, FireDogLake and CagePrisoners, to name a just a few.  Next to Clive Stafford Smith of Reprieve, Mr. Worthington is one of the very best sources for information on Guantanamo and extraordinary rendition.

On Friday, November 21, Worthington published a detailed plan for closing Guantanamo, which can be read in full at AntiWar.com. Let's examine a few of the key points. All blockquotes are from the AntiWar.com link unless otherwise attributed.
The 50 prisoners cleared for release

Of the 255 prisoners currently held at Guantánamo, around 50 have been "approved for transfer" - many for at least three years - but they remain in Guantánamo, mostly imprisoned in conditions that would task the resilience of the most hardened convicted criminals on the US mainland, for two particular reasons.

The first is because they are from countries with notoriously poor human rights records (including China, Libya, Syria, Tunisia and Uzbekistan) or unstable regimes like Iraq, and cannot be returned because of international treaties preventing the return of foreign nationals to countries where they face the risk of torture. The second reason is that the administration's insistence that they are still "enemy combatants" (or are "no longer enemy combatants") has deterred other countries from accepting them.

In the hopes of for a renewed spirit of cooperation with our European allies in the early phase of the Obama administration, five leading human rights groups have called on European governments to provide humanitarian protection to Guantánamo detainees who will not be charged with any crime but cannot be returned to their countries of origin for fear of torture or other serious human rights violations.

Amnesty International, the Center for Constitutional Rights, Human Rights Watch, Reprieve and the International Federation for Human Rights are urging governments to work with the incoming US administration to take this step to help facilitate the closure of the detention facility at Guantánamo.

The human rights groups made their call after a two-day strategic workshop in Berlin, convened by the NGOs with others active on the issue of humanitarian protection.  (November 10, AIUK)

Worthington: If the President-elect really wants to do the right thing, which will also send out a positive message to the United States' allies abroad, then he should make the first move by allowing the 17 remaining Uighurs at Guantánamo (Muslims from China's Xinjiang province, who had fled to Afghanistan to escape Chinese persecution) to settle in the United States.

Mmm-hmm. This is exactly right, in my opinion. The Uighurs are political prisoners, not terrorists. Allowing them to remain in the U.S. is a the best possible end result of Boumediene v. Bush, the SCOTUS ruling in favor of constitutional habeas corpus rights. Judge Urbina's opinion that the Uighurs were not "enemy combatants" was, as you know, sidetracked by an insidious countermove that "enemy combatants" status nonwithstanding, the Uighurs aren't citizens, exerting that the executive branch "has authority to hold aliens in detention even if they are not considered enemies of the US," adding, for good measure, "even if the detention is indefinite, it is still lawful." Irony, thy name is Bush, George W.

The 80 prisoners scheduled to face trial by Military Commission

President-Elect Obama:

I also will reject a legal framework that does not work. There has been only one conviction at Guantanamo. It was for a guilty plea on material support for terrorism. The sentence was 9 months. There has not been one conviction of a terrorist act. I have faith in America's courts, and I have faith in our JAGs. As President, I will close Guantanamo, reject the Military Commissions Act, and adhere to the Geneva Conventions. Our Constitution and our Uniform Code of Military Justice provide a framework for dealing with the terrorists.

Of the 17 prisoners currently facing trial by Military Commission, for example, two - Omar Khadr and Mohamed Jawad - were juveniles when they were seized, and should have been rehabilitated rather then punished under the terms of the Optional Protocol to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (on the involvement of children in armed conflict).

One to two dozen other detainees could be released who are not accused of killing US forces, and have no connection with al-Qaeda. (Link)

To these can be added some, or perhaps the majority of the ten prisoners transferred to Guantánamo from secret CIA prisons in September 2004, the 14 "high-value detainees" - including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and the other alleged 9/11 conspirators - who were transferred in September 2006, and two of the six prisoners who arrived at Guantánamo between March 2007 and March 2008. These prisoners - somewhere between 35 and 50 in total - are the only ones who should be moved to the US mainland to face trials in federal courtrooms.

Holding prisoners forever without charge or trial is clearly an untenable solution, as it simply perpetuates the Bush administration's crimes, and recent suggestions - by both Democrats and Republicans - that another new trial system should be instigated, or that a form of "preventive detention" should be introduced, are just as redolent of the arrogance of the Bush years, and indicate that those proposing them have learned nothing from the abuse of the Constitution over the last seven years.

Salim Hamdan may be an urgent priority for the President-Elect. If the outgoing President insists on holding Hamdan after his sentence is served, President Obama will have to ensure that he is allowed to return to his family in Yemen.

The 125 prisoners who are "too dangerous" to be released

The notion that prisoners can be "too dangerous to release but not guilty enough to prosecute" is another hallmark of the Bush administration's disdain for the law, but this, too, has been embraced by enthusiasts for a new policy of "preventive detention."

The 125 prisoners in question are from a variety of nations - a few dozen of the remaining Afghans, several dozen more from the countries of North Africa and the Gulf - but up to half are from the largest remaining group at Guantánamo: the Yemenis. Unlike the 130 Saudis, who were mostly released from Guantánamo in 2006 and 2007, after the Saudi government instigated a rehabilitation program (involving religious retraining and support in finding wives and employment), which met with the approval of the US authorities, only 13 of the 108 Yemenis in Guantánamo have been released, even though they, like the Saudis, were, for the most part, a mixture of Taliban foot soldiers and humanitarian aid workers and missionaries, caught up in an undiscriminating dragnet.

The problem, as has been repeatedly stated, is that the US authorities claim that they are not convinced that the Yemeni government will be able to guarantee that the men will not continue to pose a threat to the United States. For their part, as the Houston Chronicle reported on Saturday, "Yemeni officials say they're ready to try many of the men and imprison those who are convicted, but they complain that US officials refuse to share evidence with them."

The Yemeni foreign minister, Abu Bakr al-Kirbi, explained, "Based on the information we have, some of the Guantánamo prisoners have nothing to do with terrorism. We cannot imprison them without a court sentence. We cannot do something that is against our laws. We are accountable to our own public."

"I personally believe that for many, if not most, of the Guantánamo prisoners from Yemen, any reeducation or rehabilitation program is unnecessary because they are in fact innocent of any wrongdoing whatsoever. But if all that stands between my clients' continued imprisonment and their transfer back home is the lack of a similar rehabilitation program, then surely it is in the Yemen citizenry's best interest to demand that their leaders establish a similar program," commented Falkoff. (Yemeni Times)

With the success of Hamoud Al-Hitar's program for repatriated Saudis, a deal between the US and Yemen could be reached.

Worthington has a blueprint that I find nearly ideal, but reminds us of the work going forward:

Then we can move on to what lies behind Guantánamo: the unaccountable prisons in Afghanistan and Iraq, which hold an estimated 39,000 prisoners, and the unknown number of prisoners still held in secret CIA custody, or rendered to torture in third countries, who constitute "America's Disappeared."

 

Full post as published by Never In Our Names on November 22, 2008 (boomark / email).