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Grubble Grubble
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Friday, August 23, 2002 :::
rant
What about the prisoners in Guantanamo? No one will argue that many of these detainees are dangerous people. Detainee is was we are currently calling them because we have not yet determined their status. This is a legal loophole. We have held, and interrogated, these men for months without providing them access to legal representation or without bringing charges against them.
Families of some of these detainees are currently suing the United States in U.S. federal court to obtain the right for their detained relatives to have access to legal representation and some form of court proceeding. It is the claim of these families that some of the detainees were aid workers caught up in the mass escape of al-Qaida members as they attempted to flee across the borders of Afghanistan.
Even foreign governments are now applying pressure to the Bush administration to classify these detainees. Many are demanding the return of their citizens. We have recently begun to allow diplomatic missions from these governments to visit Guantanamo and identify their citizens. The delegation from Kuwait, a strong U.S. ally, has demanded that we consider these detainees innocent until proven guilty.
If you listen to the convicts in U.S. prisons, they will tell you that the prison system is full of innocent men. Very few people will actually freely admit to being guilty of the crimes for which they were convicted. However, every year thousands of people are released from U.S. prisons after new evidence is presented to show that they are, indeed, innocent. Some of them are released from death row.
I am not saying that everyone in prison is innocent. I can probably say with great confidence that most are not. But some are. Is it not then possible that some of the detainees at Guantanamo are also innocent? That maybe some people were accidentally caught up in the sweeps? What makes these convicts different, however, is that they were given a right to defend the innocence they claimed.
We will never find out if any of the detainees are innocent (of charges that have not been currently brought against them) unless these men are given a chance to defend themselves in some court of law. Civilian government says they are under military custody. Would this not make them prisoners of war? Well, according to the Bush administration they are not.
The funny thing is though, they were captured in a war. We call our actions in Afghanistan a war on terrorism. The Bush administration has continually claimed that the U.S. is at war. I, for one, do not remember a declaration of war from Congress, which is legally how we are supposed to do it, but we claim to be at war.
To me, it would mean that these men are enemy combatants, and thus, prisoners of war. This would give them access to some form of U.S. court system. For some reason that I have yet to fathom, the Bush administration does not feel the same way. Federal district judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly apparently agreed with our executive branch. She ruled that the detention facility at Guantanamo is outside sovereign U.S. territory and the detainees are not then entitled to writs of habeas corpus. Therefore, U.S. courts have no jurisdiction to hear cases involving detainees.
Hmmm, Guantanamo is a U.S. military base. U.S. military law applies there and it is manned by U.S. government troops, yet it is outside sovereign U.S. territory. I am sure the Cubans might be interested in this information. It may give them a claim to take back the base since it is not U.S. territory per a ruling by our own court system.
Some lawyers for the detainees are now discussing taking the case to the Cuban court system, as Guantanamo is in Cuba and we only lease the land from them. I am not holding my breath that the U.S. government will agree to allow the Cubans to decide the fate of al-Qaida detainees.
The government of the U.S. is committing human rights abuses in regards to these detainees. We are holding them without charges and interrogating them. We refuse to classify them and thusly, have stripped them of their rights. It MUST stop.
/rant
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