Obama seeks Guant ánamo-style prison on US soil

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Obama seeks Guantánamo-style prison on US soil
By Bill Van Auken
17 December 2009

With its decision to purchase a state prison in rural Illinois, the
Obama administration is preparing to recreate the essential features
of the infamous military prison in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba—indefinite
detention without charges and trials by military commissions—on US soil.

This latest move has exposed Obama’s pledge to close down the prison
at the US military base in Cuba as an empty gesture. In substance, the
administration is adopting the criminal practices of the Bush
administration as its own, while seeking to legitimize them through
legislation and empty rhetoric about American “values and ideals.”

The administration announced its decision Tuesday, releasing the text
of a letter it had sent to Illinois Governor Pat Quinn, who last month
had first proposed the use of the Thomson Correctional Center, a
maximum security prison located 150 miles west of Chicago. The
facility, which has the capacity to house 1,600 prisoners, was built
in 2001, but never fully opened because of state budgetary problems.
Quinn pitched the proposal as a means of bringing revenue and jobs
into an area hard hit by the recession.

In an indication of the importance the administration attaches to this
proposal, the letter to Quinn was signed by Defense Secretary Robert
Gates, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Attorney General Eric
Holder, National Intelligence Director Dennis Blair and Homeland
Security Secretary Janet Napolitano.

This letter described the proposed facility as “part of the
president’s aggressive posture in the fight against al-Qaeda.”

It vowed that the prison would be refitted to make it “the most secure
facility in the nation” and to employ methods more severe than even
“security standards at the nation’s only ‘supermax’ prison in
Florence, Colorado, where there has never been an escape or external
attack.”

Pentagon officials have indicated that 1,500 military personnel would
be assigned to run the prison.

The Obama administration appears set to create even more hellish
conditions for the detainees in Illinois than existed at the facility
in Cuba.

This is in part an attempt to placate the Republican right, which has
portrayed the decision to close Guantánamo as a concession to the
“terrorists” and the transfer of its detainees to the United States as
a mortal threat to the American population.

The Democrats in Congress have bowed to this right-wing hysteria,
joining in a 91-to-5 Senate vote last June to deny the administration
funding to close Guantánamo and bar the sending of its inmates to the
US for prolonged detention.

Now, before it can begin putting together the facility, the Obama
administration must go back to Congress for new legislation both
funding the prison and providing explicit authority to the executive
branch to transfer the Guantánamo detainees to the US in order to
detain them indefinitely without charges or try them before military
tribunals.

Until now, the Obama administration, like the Bush administration
before it, has claimed such rights under the Authorization for Use of
Military Force (AUMF) passed by Congress in the wake of the September
11, 2001, attacks. It has maintained this position even in the face of
a 2006 US Supreme Court ruling (Hamdan vs. Rumsfeld) that there was
nothing in the AUMF legislation allowing the President to abrogate the
constitutional right of due process.

Most immediately affected by the Obama administration’s decision are
the 210 men still held at Guantánamo, most of whom have been detained
for nearly eight years without any justification.

According to administration officials, 116 of these men have been
cleared for repatriation to their homelands or to third countries. But
in the bulk of these cases, no country has agreed to accept them.
Administration officials have claimed that these detainees will be
kept at Guantánamo until they can be released abroad.

This is one more indication that the pledge announced by Obama last
year with great fanfare that Guantánamo would shut down within a year
will not be kept, no matter what happens to the prison in Illinois.
Moreover, refitting the Thomson facility would take several months and
could begin only after funding is approved by Congress.

A few of the other Guantánamo detainees are to be tried in federal
court, held during the trials in facilities near the courthouse. This
is the case with five detainees who are to be brought to New York City
to be tried on charges stemming from the September 11 terrorist
attacks. Among them is the alleged organizer of the attacks, Khalid
Sheikh Mohammed, who was subjected to waterboarding 183 times as well
as other forms of torture.

All of those brought to Thomson would be denied trials in a normal
court. One group would be brought before military tribunals in which
their rights are severely abridged. Last month, it was announced that
five others were slated for this treatment. Among them is the
23-year-old Canadian citizen Omar Khadr, who was detained by US forces
in Afghanistan when he was only 15 and subjected to eight years of
imprisonment and abuse.

As for the rest of the Guantánamo detainees, they will be locked away
in Thomson—if it is run like other “supermax” prisons, in solitary
confinement—indefinitely without ever being formally charged much less
brought to trial.

Among the considerations in the Obama administration’s decisions on
which inmates are given trials and which not is how much their being
tortured would impede prosecution.

The Center for Constitutional Rights, which has defended a number of
the Guantánamo detainees, issued a statement in which it charged that
the Obama administration’s plans for Thomson showed that it was acting
“merely to shut down the symbol of Guantánamo without dismantling the
injustice of Guantánamo. A change of scenery does nothing to restore
the rule of law.”

Legislation allowing preventive detention within the United States has
implications that go far beyond the fate of the 210 men still held at
Guantánamo.

The US government needs a facility like the one proposed at Thomson
not just for those presently held in Cuba, but for those it will
detain in the future.

The Obama administration has upheld its predecessor’s claim to the
right to seize supposed terrorist suspects off the street in any
country it pleases and hold them without charges on the theory that
the US is engaged in a “global war on terrorism.” It has gone into
court to defend the use of rendition, in which such detainees can be
handed over to other governments for the purpose of interrogation and
torture.

These practices will inevitably create a steady flow of new detainees
for the facility that is being referred to as “Guantánamo North.”

Moreover, the passage of such legislation would essentially legitimize
the use of presidential power to suspend the bedrock right of habeas
corpus and to hold those deemed by the government to be terrorist
suspects under preventive detention on US soil.

While such treatment is supposedly restricted to what are now being
termed “alien unprivileged enemy belligerents,” a precedent is being
set that can be extended under conditions of growing crisis and
intensifying social struggle to anyone seen as a threat to the
government and the ruling financial elite that it defends.

http://wsws.org/articles/2009/dec2009/guan-d17.shtml

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