Torture Scandals Make Bush Policies Backfire
Senator Says U.S. Needs to Close Shameful Guantanamo Prison
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If we want a safer world, the US is going to have to stop torturing and mistreating prisoners -- in case nobody in the Bush administration has figured it out yet, torture makes other people hate you. Here's a bit of news circulated by the NY Transfer News Collective. The original appeared in the Washington Post (US).
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A leading Senate Democrat said the United States
needs to move toward shutting down the military prison camp at
Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
"This has become the greatest propaganda tool that exists for recruiting
of terrorists around the world. And it is unnecessary to be in that
position," said Sen. Joseph Biden, D-Del.
A Pentagon report detailed incidents in which U.S.
guards at Guantanamo desecrated the Quran. Last month, Amnesty
International called the detention center for alleged terrorists "the
gulag of our time," a charge Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld
dismissed as "reprehensible."
The chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, GOP Sen. Arlen Specter
of Pennsylvania, plans hearings this month on the treatment of foreign
terrorism suspects at the prison camp.
Biden, the top Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee,
proposed that an independent commission take a look at Guantanamo and
make recommendations.
"But the end result is, I think we should end up shutting it down,
moving those prisoners," he told ABC's "This Week."
"Those that we have reason to keep, keep. And those we don't, let go."
He added, "I think more Americans are in jeopardy as a consequence of
the perception that exists worldwide with its existence than if there
were no Gitmo."
There are about 540 detainees at Guantanamo Bay. Some have been there
more than three years without being charged with a crime. Most were
captured on the battlefields of Afghanistan in 2001 and 2002 and were
sent to Guantanamo Bay in hope of extracting useful intelligence about
the al-Qaida terrorist network.
Excerpts from a New York Times editorial
June 5, 2005
Un-American by Any Name
Now that the Bush administration has made clear how offended it is at
Amnesty International's word choice in characterizing the Guantanamo Bay
detention camp "the gulag of our times," we hope it will soon get around
to dealing with the substantive problems that the Amnesty report is only
the latest to identify. What Guantanamo exemplifies -- harsh, indefinite
detention without formal charges or legal recourse -- may or may not
bring to mind the Soviet Union's sprawling network of Stalinist penal
colonies. It certainly has nothing in common with any American notions
of justice or the rule of law.
Our colleague Thomas L. Friedman offered just the right solution a few
days back. The best thing Washington can now do about this national
shame is to shut it down. It is a propaganda gift to America's enemies;
an embarrassment to our allies; a damaging repudiation of the American
justice system; and a highly effective recruiting tool for Islamic
radicals, including future terrorists.
If legitimate legal cases can be made under American law against any of
the more than 500 remaining Guantanamo detainees, they should be made in
American courts, as they should have been all along. If, as the
administration says, some of these prisoners are active, dangerous
members of a conspiracy to commit terrorism against the United States,
there must be legitimate charges to file against them. Those prisoners
with no charges to face should be set free and allowed to go home or to
another country. The administration must not ship them off to
cooperative dictatorships where thuggish local authorities can torture
them without direct American accountability -- as they have reportedly
done recently in places like Uzbekistan, Syria and Egypt.
What makes Amnesty's gulag metaphor apt is that Guantanamo is merely one
of a chain of shadowy detention camps that also includes Abu Ghraib in
Iraq, the military prison at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan and other,
secret locations run by the intelligence agencies. Each has produced its
own stories of abuse, torture and criminal homicide. These are not
isolated incidents, but part of a tightly linked global detention system
with no accountability in law. Prisoners have been transferred from camp
to camp. So have commanding officers. And perhaps not coincidentally, so
have specific methods of mistreatment.
Over more than two centuries of peace and war, the United States has
developed a highly effective legal system that, while far from perfect,
is rightly admired around the world. The shadowy parallel system that
the Bush administration created after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks has
by now proved its inferiority in almost every respect. It does not seem
to have been effective in finding and prosecuting the most dangerous
terrorists, and it has been a disaster in undermining America's
reputation for fairness, just treatment of the guilty and humane
treatment of the innocent.
It is time to return to the basic principles of justice that served
America so well even in the most perilous times of the past. Shutting
down Guantanamo is just a first step. But it is a crucial step that
would pay instant dividends around the world, not only toward repairing
America's reputation but also toward enhancing its overall security.
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