What happens when you have no civil rights

Time magazine has a very depressing story this week on the treatment of prisoners being held at Guantanamo Bay. Some of this we've known about for a while, though having it presented all in one article is a bit unnerving, but there's also new information claiming that many - roughly 20% - of the prisoners may well be innocent, and were only incarcerated because we were offering rewards for the capture of people connected to al Qaeda and were willing to take the word of the person getting the reward as sufficient evidence of a terrorist connection.

So, lets imagine it's 2 years ago, right after the fall of the Taliban, and you're an Afghan warlord and you're a bit short on cash. You go out and grab Ali (who's just a random person you know nothing about), bring him to the US officials and say "This is Ali. He's in cahoots with al Qaeda." The US officials give you your reward, and poor Ali - who's done nothing wrong - gets shipped off to Guantanamo Bay in Cuba.

Now, the Geneva Convention grants specific rights to prisoners of war, but the Bush administration doesn't want any of these "detainees" to have any real rights, so they decide to call Ali - and everyone else in Guantanamo Bay - "enemy combatants", which, to the best of my knowledge, is a term that hasn't yet been defined for the purpose of international law, so there are no rights spelled out for "enemy combatants." So, Ali gets shipped off to Camp X-Ray where he's been held captive for the last 2 years. As the article notes:

The detainees—660 suspects from 44 countries, scooped up in the war on terrorism—cannot challenge their arrests or plead their cases or even talk to a lawyer, because the U.S. government denies that they have those rights.

Ali doesn't have a lot of options at this point. Since he can't see a lawyer, he can't prove he's innocent, and the only way he can even hope to either get out or at least get into "Camp Four", a relatively nice area of the prison, is if he provides useful information to his interrogators. Unfortunately, since he's innocent, he doesn't have any information. So there he sits.

Up until now, the only hope our hypothetical Ali, or someone like him, had, was that the government would decide he was "harmless" and release him, but while some prisoners have been release for that reason, it hasn't happened a whole lot yet. Otherwise, the outlook is pretty bleak.

Inmates arrive with no knowledge of how long they will stay, facing the possibility of trial by a military tribunal whose procedures have yet to be tested, on charges that have yet to be revealed and that carry sentences that may depend on not just what crimes they committed but what country they are from. The U.S. last week cut a deal with Australia that if its detainee David Hicks is found guilty, he will not be executed and will be allowed to have his family in the courtroom and talk to his lawyers without Americans listening in. But the Brits are pushing for more, and what about the inmates from Yemen or Pakistan or Afghanistan? Seeing the risks of multiple standards of justice, Pentagon officials said last week that they are conducting a wholesale review of the tribunal rules.

A new ray of hope has come in the form of the US Supreme Court, which has agreed to hear cases filed by the families of some of the detainees that could force the government's hand. And, in a sense, it already has.

A U.S. military official tells Time that at least 140 detainees—"the easiest 20%"—are scheduled for release. The processing of these men has sped up since the Supreme Court announced it would take the case, said the source, who believes the military is "waiting for a politically propitious time to release them."

The Court is expected to issue a ruling possibly in July, so apparently the "politically propitious time" will be considerably before the elections, but I have little doubt that it will come at a time when Bush has a grave need to be seen as magnanimous, with the hope that no on will notice it took us 2 years to figure out that it's likely that some of these people we've been keeping imprisoned were only handed over as a quick way for some warlord to make a buck.

Jim Henley at Unqualified Offering is also covering this story, and has a very powerful post on the matter. He notes that this seems to be another part of the Bush patterns of things turning out to be a lot worse than initially reported, even though we've had officials telling us that they're actually better. I strongly recommend taking the time to read it. Here's an excerpt to whet your appetite:

We're told one month that most of Iraq is not just quiet but friendly and the next month, in one of those quiet friendly parts, crowds drag American bodies through the street. We're told that there's no guerrilla war, then that there is a guerrilla war but we've turned the corner, then we notice that fatal casualties among our soldiers have grown exponentially for seven months and more (but we're turning the corner again).

Posted by thorswitch at December 1, 2003 05:05 AM | TrackBack