US to hold 50 Guantanamo prisoners indefinitely

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US to hold 50 Guantanamo prisoners indefinitely
By Barry Grey
23 January 2010

The US Justice Department has determined that nearly 50 of the
remaining 196 detainees at the military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba
are to be held indefinitely, without charges or trial, according to a
front-page article published Friday by the Washington Post.

The Post reports that the decision is the result of a case-by-case
review of the remaining Guantanamo prisoners by a Justice
Department-led task force set up by President Obama last year. The
detainees have been held under barbaric conditions and subjected to
torture, most of them languishing in the prison camp for eight years.
The Post report cites unnamed administration officials, who spoke of
the task force’s conclusions in advance of the public release of its
report.

News of the decision came on the one-year anniversary of Obama’s
signing of an executive order to close the infamous prison at
Guantanamo. That pledge was announced with great fanfare on the second
full day of the new administration as evidence that Obama would
reverse the Bush administration’s legacy of criminality and contempt
for democratic rights. It has not been carried out.

Instead, Obama is keeping Guantanamo going while he works to open a
military prison on US soil, rightly called “Guantanamo North” by its
critics, to which those detainees not repatriated to their home
countries or to other countries are to be kept, either to be jailed
indefinitely or tried before military tribunals. Others, newly
captured in the so-called war against Al Qaeda, and other “extremists”
are to be thrown into the new military prison, which the
administration plans to set up in Thomson, Illinois.

These moves expose Obama’s pledge to close Guantanamo as an empty
gesture, designed to refurbish the image of the United States around
the world while his administration continues the police-state methods
of Bush.

In holding prisoners indefinitely without trial, Obama is using the
same legal pretext that was used by the Bush administration--the
Authorization for Use of Military Force passed by Congress one week
after the September 11, 2001 attacks. The administration maintains
this position even in the face of a 2006 US Supreme Court ruling
(Hamdan v. Rumsfeld) that there was nothing in the congressional
authorization allowing the president to abrogate the constitutional
right of due process.

The Center for Constitutional Rights, which has defended a number of
the Guantanamo detainees, released a statement Thursday condemning the
decision to hold prisoners under indefinite detention. "Today was
supposed to be the deadline by which President Obama would close
Guantánamo,” the Center declared. “Now it will be the anniversary of
the president’s decision to abandon our most fundamental
constitutional principles. Our nation was built on the idea that no
president or king should have the power to imprison people solely at
will… and that it is up to the courts to determine whether individuals
have engaged in acts that justify depriving them of their liberty.

"Guantánamo remains open, and remains a symbol of lawlessness and
abuse. Now the president has committed to holding approximately 50 men
without any trial not as a result of anything the men have done in the
past but because of a fear of what the men may do in the future and
because they have been deemed too difficult to prosecute but too
dangerous to release. This is… an assault on the rule of law, our
principles and our system of justice.”

Anthony D. Romero, executive director of the American Civil Liberties
Union, said, “There is no statutory regime in America that allows us
to hold people without charge or trial indefinitely.”

The government argues that it cannot try some of the Guantanamo
detainees, even in military tribunals that deny defendants basic due
process protections, because its “evidence” against them, either
hearsay evidence extracted from other prisoners or direct admissions
obtained through interrogation, is tainted by prisoner abuse. This is
tantamount to an admission that they have been tortured. The
additional reason given is that trying the detainees could compromise
intelligence-gathering and national security.

There are other reasons. The government fears the political
repercussions of testimony from defendants in open court about the
torture to which they have been subjected, as well as the danger of
defendants revealing information exposing connections between alleged
terrorists and US intelligence and police agencies.

The task force that reviewed the Guantanamo cases is comprised of
officials from the Pentagon, the State Department, the Homeland
Security Department and the Justice Department, as well agencies such
as the CIA and FBI. According to the Post, it recommended that the
detainees be divided into three main groups: about 35 to be prosecuted
in federal or military courts, at least 110 who can be released at
some point, and the nearly 50 who are to be detained indefinitely
without trial.

Of the 110 who are deemed eligible for release, 60 are Yemenis. Since
Obama indefinitely suspended the transfer of Guantanamo prisoners to
Yemen after the attempted Christmas Day airliner attack, these
detainees have no prospect of release for the foreseeable future. That
leaves only fifty whom the government is preparing to repatriate over
the next few months.

Even their release is contingent on “variables,” an administration
official told the Post, including “a changed security situation in a
proposed transfer state.”

The administration claims that all of the detainees have the right to
challenge their incarceration in habeas corpus proceedings in federal
court. However, the US appeals court which has jurisdiction over all
such cases, the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia
Circuit, earlier this month issued a sweeping ruling making it all but
impossible for detainees being held as “alien unprivileged enemy
belligerents” to prevail in such suits.

The appeals court upheld the Obama administration in opposing the
release of Ghaleb Nassar al-Bihani, a Yemeni citizen who has been
imprisoned at Guantanamo since early 2002. In its ruling, the court
declared that presidential power to jail alleged terrorists is not
limited by international law, and that Guantanamo detainees who seek
to contest the legality of their incarceration are not entitled to the
constitutional guarantees and legal norms afforded to defendants in
criminal cases.

The focus of the government and the media on the remaining Guantanamo
detainees obscures the fact that a far larger group of alleged “enemy
belligerents” are being held without charge or trial, under, if
anything, even more brutal conditions at the US military prison at
Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan. Last week, the Pentagon, in compliance
with a Freedom of Information request filed by the American Civil
Liberties Union, released a redacted list of 645 people being held at
the prison.

A McClatchy newspapers investigative report revealed that many of the
Bagram prisoners were civilians who were arrested based on false
information.

http://wsws.org/articles/2010/jan2010/guan-j23.shtml

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