LONDON, 6 July 2003 — Many Americans are grateful that their President has effectively declared a world state of emergency, which suspends a number of important human rights in order to fight the “war against terrorism”.
It may make Americans feel safer that more than 600 Al-Qaida suspects have been detained for a year and a half at Guantanamo Bay, the US base on Cuba. Many in this country, and elsewhere, may sympathize with the American position, and feel that the US is protecting them, too, from the awful threat of suicide terrorism. It is not to belittle that threat, or people’s anxieties about it, to say that the American treatment of the Guantanamo detainees is intolerable. It is a fundamental human right that no one should be deprived of liberty without being promptly charged with a crime. So basic and universal is this right that the US government has had to invoke what might be called the AA Milne rule of international law.
According to the US authorities, Guantanamo Bay is not in Cuba. It isn’t in the United States, because if it were, anyone on it would be afforded the protections of the Constitution. “It isn’t really anywhere. It’s somewhere else instead.”
This miserable village of cell-cages could not be in any remotely democratic nation on earth, because any such nation would have laws requiring prisoners to be charged within a specified time and to have a right of appeal to a higher court. Such basic rights can be suspended in times of national emergency. But even that stretching of the normal meaning of words would not provide the US government with the flexibility it wants.
Nor would President Bush allow the detainees to be described as prisoners of war. Under the Geneva Conventions, that would confer rights on them beyond those the US is prepared to see. This is “victor’s justice” with a vengeance.
So the Guantanamo detainees have been held for 18 months in an extraordinary and unprecedented limbo. It is surely up to the US government to explain why this is necessary to reduce the threat of terrorist attack.
Yet the US administration obviously feels under no pressure to defend itself. The posture of the British Government has been supine. While George Bush has ordered that no US citizens can be brought before the military tribunal in Guantanamo Bay, Tony Blair seems quite happy to allow British citizens, who must be presumed innocent until proved guilty, to be held without charge for 18 months and then tried by a military court under rules made up specially for the occasion. The saddest aspect of this appalling situation is that Blair knows he can get away with it. Public opinion in this country would, we suspect, be different if the British citizens facing this caricature of justice were white, or were not Muslims.
The presumption of guilt is so strong, the rules of the court so tilted against the defendant, the conditions of detention so harsh, that these trials would be lambasted by the US and British governments as dictatorial if they were held anywhere else in the world. They are a negation of the very principles in the name of which the struggle against terrorism ought to be fought.
