Mine, they're all mine to do whatever
I choose to do
(Even More Torture if I say so)
Interesting
story here from the NY Times: Now called the the “forever prisoners at Gitmo.”
Background: Even before he took office, Trump made it
clear that no one would be getting out of the military prison at Guantánamo
Bay, Cuba, on his watch. Trump said: “They were extremely dangerous people,” and
it didn’t matter how long they had been locked up or whether they had been
charged with any crimes. They should give up any hope of release – hence the
label “forever prisoners.”
Trump wasn’t
just walking away from the efforts of his two predecessors to shrink the
population of the prison and, eventually, to close it. He wanted to make it
bigger — to load it
up with some bad dudes as he said.
The status of Gitmo detainees today:
There are 41
remain locked up there.
Thirteen
either have active cases in the military commission system or have been
convicted.
The rest
have been held as enemy combatants, but without charge, some for up to 16 years,
and five of those have been cleared for transfer, meaning that the Pentagon,
the White House, and intelligence agencies long ago agreed that they pose no
security threat.
Many of
those were arrested under questionable circumstances; and, some were tortured,
either at CIA black sites or at Guantánamo.
Eleven of
these “so-called forever prisoners” filed
a habeas corpus petition in the US District Court in Washington, DC.
Those 11 are all foreign-born Muslims, and they say their continued detention violates
the Constitution’s guarantee of due process and that the 2001 law that gave
presidents the power to send enemy combatants to Guantánamo.
One of the
plaintiffs, prisoner No. 893, a 45-year-old Yemeni named
Tolfiq al- Bihani, has been held at Guantánamo for nearly 15 years. He was
cleared for conditional release in 2010. Even the Saudi government agreed to
accept him in 2016, along with nine other Yemenis.
Those nine were
in fact all transferred, but Mr. al-Bihani remains locked up at Guantánamo
without any explanation.
For the
record:
Former President
George W. Bush may be guilty of creating the constitutional calamity that is
Guantánamo today, but at least he made an effort to empty it of men who clearly
posed no threat to the United States. He released 532 detainees by the end of
his second term.
Then former President
Barack Obama, who was blocked by Republicans in Congress from keeping his
campaign promise to close the prison, established regular reviews of each
inmate’s case and worked intensively to negotiate the transfer of those who
could not be returned safely to their home countries. In the end, he managed to
release 197 detainees.
But, during
the 2016 presidential campaign, Trump bragged that he would “absolutely
authorize torture techniques like waterboarding, on the ground that terrorism
suspects deserve it anyway.”
And, of course not release any more.
The
remaining Guantánamo prisoners appear fated to stay locked up but not based on
an individual assessment of their cases — there will be none of those under Trump.
Why? Because they serve as convenient symbols of the
aggressive anti-terrorist and anti-Muslim platform he ran on.
Yet those men there
continue to make a straightforward case for their release.
The Supreme Court
has ruled that prisoners at Guantánamo must have a meaningful
opportunity to challenge the legal and factual grounds for their
detention, which means that the federal courts have the power to review those
claims and grant any appropriate relief.
So, if our Constitution stands for
anything, the plaintiffs argue in their suit, which was filed on their behalf
by the Center for Constitutional Rights,
it must stand for the proposition that the government cannot detain someone for
16 years without charge.
The new legal challenge represents the sharpest test
yet of America’s commitment to its most important founding principles — the guarantee of due process and the right
to habeas corpus, — even for those at Guantánamo.
My 2 cents: So, will we continue to tolerate locking
up more than two dozen men there, without charges, forever? That is the $64,000
question isn’t it?
Now just imagine for a moment if we still had dozens or more
of our POW’s locked held and locked up in North Vietnam at the infamous “Hanoi
Hilton” like Sen. John McCain was for over five years after he was shot down in
October 1967.
Yeah, just imagine that over the past 51 years.
Even North Vietnam
(at the time) considered that to be “an undeclared war” and yet they labeled
our POWs as “war criminals.
Thanks for stopping – these updates are slow and wide
apart, but still a timely issue.
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