Yesterday I saw the following headline on the BBC website: "Guantanamo Saudi 'kills himself'"- the article reports that there are currently 380 prisoners there and that some of them have been held for 5 years. This inmate has not been the first to commit suicide, and he likely will not be the last, as long as the detainees are held indefinately without any of their basic rights, including the right to be charged with a crime, to hear the charges against them, to see the evidence against them, to refute the evidence against them, and the right to an attorney.
I forwarded this article to the Stanford Amnesty list, and received a response that brings up some important questions:
The questions that were asked are:
1. Should the prison camp be closed down?
2. If so, where should the prisoners go?
3. Do you think any of them are probably guilty of fighting a war against us?
I replied with the a rather long email...
...but I believe that these are important questions that many Americans are asking. Hopefully we can educate the stanford community about america's use of torture, and create a strong movement to shut down gitmo altogether.
The following is my reponse:
One of stanford Amnesty's big projects this year was to educate people about the American torture policy- so we all did a bunch of research and the created the
torture.stanford.edu blog -- what we found was that the United States has been using torture as a method of interogation with the individuals that it has in Guantanamo, and that this policy of using torture was then written into american law by Congress in such a way that it was actually legal. Additionally, the United States would perform "extraordinary renditions" in which it would send detainees to countries to be interrogated using torture. These detainees were inaccurately classified as "unlawful enemy combatants" and were thus denied any of their fundamental rights under the geneva conventions
In terms of Guantanamo, as the BBC article indicates, there are currently 380 people held there -- the lucky ones have the right to very minimal access to attorneys- there was a hunger strike last year at guantanamo, and several of the prisoners came very very close to dying- then this man just committed suicide- this demonstrates the simple truth: conditions there are not good.
Many of these individuals were sent to guantanamo bay based on the say-so of a bounty hunter who had a personal grudge against them, other simply had the same name as someone else, and still others were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time (the documentaries "Road to Guantanamo" and "The Strange Case" both explain this in much greater detail).
So given this information, these indivudal must be granted their fundamental rights: to be charged with a crime, to hear the charges against them, to have an opportunity to see the evidence, to refute the evidence and the charges, and a right to attorney. And this is just the beginning.
Many (probably most) of these inmates are not threats to our security -- they were
mistakenly taken to guantanamo bay, but they will not be freed until they are granted
their rights.
As for the others, who pose true theats to the US security- if we have the evidence that proves this, then they should be charged in a fair trial and put in jail. If we do not
have any evidence against them, then we must abide by the law "innocent until proven guilty"
Every time the something occurs at Guantanamo Bay, be it the pictures or the hunger
strike, or this recent suicide- more and more people start hating America, and suddenly more terrorists are born. this is completely counter to our goal of protecting
fundamental liberties and our security.