It's hard to think of a better symbol of the abuses of the Bush administration than the prison at Guantanámo Bay, Cuba. It was put in Cuba so the administration could claim that American law didn't apply there. It was meant to be a loophole in the Constitution and the American concept of justice. "Cuban sovereignty over Guantanámo exists only in the abstract," wrote human rights lawyer Joanne Mariner for FindLaw.com. "Yet it is, for the U.S. government, a convenient legal fiction. In the current litigation over the fate of the hundreds of detainees held on Guantanámo, the government's position is premised on the fact that Guantanámo is technically foreign soil. Because Guantanámo is part of Cuba, argues the government, it is beyond the reach of American courts."
Of course, this was a ridiculous argument -- the prisoners are inarguably in US custody, not Cuban -- and it was eventually shot down by the courts. Prisoners at Guantanámo Bay had the right to habeas corpus restored, with the right to trial. So, the administration decided the wisest thing to do would be to drag their feet. In June, I ran the math and figured out that, at the rate the trials were going, the last Gitmo detainee could expect to see the inside of a courtroom about 583 years from now. The phrase "justice delayed is justice denied" is usually meant less literally.
Many of the detainees at Guantanámo were innocent, swept up in a bounty program that required no proof of anything. People would be captured by locals and basically sold to the US. Some were terrorists, but some were just neighbors someone had a problem with, street criminals, political rivals, or complete strangers kidnapped and turned in for the bounty. As a result, innocent people were exposed to terrorist ideology and radicalized. In the end, Gitmo is creating terrorists and terrorist sympathizers.
McClatchy Newspapers:
Mohammed Naim Farouq was a thug in the lawless Zormat district of eastern Afghanistan. He ran a kidnapping and extortion racket, and he controlled his turf with a band of gunmen who rode around in trucks with AK-47 rifles.
U.S. troops detained him in 2002, although he had no clear ties to the Taliban or al Qaida. By the time Farouq was released from Guantanamo the next year, however — after more than 12 months of what he described as abuse and humiliation at the hands of American soldiers — he'd made connections to high-level militants.
In fact, he'd become a Taliban leader. When the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency released a stack of 20 "most wanted" playing cards in 2006 identifying militants in Afghanistan and Pakistan — with Osama bin Laden at the top — Farouq was 16 cards into the deck.
And each day these people are kept in our tropical concentration camp, the more likely it is that they'll become terrorists themselves -- or at least terrorist sympathizers...
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