While Iraq has been the rock on which both diplomatically and militarily the Bush administration has grounded, the Guantanamo Bay detention center may come to be seen as the legal iceberg that sank most excuses the White House cobbled together to justify its conduct of the post-9/11 war on terror.
In 2002, after the invasion of Afghanistan overthrew the Taleban and ousted Al-Qaeda from its bases and training camps, a large number of alleged terrorists came into US hands. Washington cast around for somewhere secure to hold these individuals and hit upon the US naval base on the tip of Cuba, which although sovereign American territory, was as Bush and his advisers thought, beyond the reach of the US civil judges.
Initially the outside world concurred in this isolated prison camp. There was then and there is still no doubt today, that some of those captured in Afghanistan are extremely dangerous fanatics. The assumption was, however, that Washington had good grounds for believing that pretty well all of their prisoners were hardened terrorists. In 2003 some 750 suspected terrorists were transferred from the temporary Camp X-Ray to the purpose-built camp Delta and there began a regime of detention that has brought humiliation to them and shame to the Americans.
The Bush administration branded the detainees “enemy combatants”, a new legal construct that deprived them of their rights as prisoners of war. At the same time their detention at Guantanamo, a purely military installation, seemed to keep them clear of the US civil courts.
It has been six long years before the US judges have acted but this month two landmark judgments have blown apart the administration’s legal fiction about the detainees’ status. First, the US Supreme Court ruled the prisoners did enjoy the same right of habeas corpus as anyone else on American territory. Then this week, the US Court of Appeals in Washington ruled that one of the detainees, a Chinese Muslim, was not an “enemy combatant” and should be released or brought to trial in a civil court.
Yet despite the Supreme Court’s judgment, the US military is still pressing ahead with plans to bring the remaining 270 detainees in Guantanamo before specially convened military tribunals. This is one more example of the Bush White House continuing to dig even when it is clear it is already in a deep hole.
However more important than this is the way in which the whole wretched Guantanamo story has demonstrated the administration’s contempt for the very values of freedom under the law, which it claimed to be defending from international terror. If Al-Qaeda was attacking American values of justice, the Bush regime has made an even better job of assailing the very same target.
The word “Guantanamo” has become synonymous with “hypocrisy” and “injustice”. It is gulag, the real one, not fictional. As such it has fueled terrorist propaganda against the United States and caused even Washington’s must loyal allies to question if the US really knows what it is doing. The sooner Guantanamo’s remaining prisoners are released or tried before US civil courts, the better.
