The US Defense Department’s court-enforced publication of at least a partial list of the names of the estimated 490 Guantanamo Bay detainees has rightly been welcomed as a key breach in the veil of secrecy that has surrounded this facility and so damaged the reputation of Washington’s war against international terror.
The pity is that the Associated Press news agency had to resort to the Freedom of Information Act to extract information, which should have been made public as soon as possible after the prisoners were taken into custody. Such details would not only have been common justice for the families of the men. If as the Bush administration insists, they are combatants, their names should have been provided under the Geneva Convention dealing with prisoners of war.
Right to the end the authorities did themselves no favors by struggling against any disclosure. Their final specious argument was that publication of the names would endanger the prisoners and their families, because some had provided information on Al-Qaeda and the Taleban in Afghanistan and elsewhere. Their rights would thus be violated. It is however the preponderance of world opinion that the incarceration of these individuals in an apparently extrajudicial limbo run entirely by the US military is already an extreme violation of their human rights.
No country, whether its is China, Myanmar, Saddam’s Iraq, Hitler’s Germany or George Bush’s United States has the right to detain people without trial. The war against international terror clearly does pose exceptional challenges for the civilized world. Nevertheless, those challenges cannot be overcome by abandoning the very fundamentals of justice that distinguish decent societies from the thugs who wish to destroy them. It was also thanks to court action last June by the Associated Press that the testimony given by 317 detainees to military tribunals deciding whether they had been “combatants” was originally published. However since all the names were omitted, it was impossible for outsiders, even the men’s own lawyers, to take any view on the evidence against them. It should also be noted that the documents published Friday omit the names of detainees who refused to go before these tribunals and therefore gave no testimony.
Whatever these men may or may not have done, the way they have been treated is itself a crime. The ruling of the US courts is helping to save America from itself and its angry knee-jerk reaction to the obscenity of 9-11. But there is still a long way to go. There is not yet much sign that the Bush White House, already deeply mired in the consequences of its inflexible policies, is planning to unpick any of the Gordian knot into which it has tied itself and America. The public still seems angry that aggression has failed. There remains neither little appetite for any subtle exploration of the failures that from the start were inherent in that aggression, nor yet any concept of how Guantanamo along with Abu Ghraib has so damaged US standing in the world.
