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Despair at Guantanamo

The three suicides should spur action on administration's detention policy

Editorial
Newsday
June 13, 2006

The suicides of three detainees at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, over the weekend have amped up calls for the administration to close that now infamous prison. But Guantanamo is a symptom. The disease is the administration's detention policy in the war on terror, which has exposed the nation to worldwide accusations of lawlessness, torture and operating secret, off-the-books prisons around the world.

If the lockup at GuantanamoBay were shuttered today, the need for a place like it to house prisoners of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq would still exist. What the situation cries out for is a meaningful, transparent, widely accepted and unquestionably legal process for determining who among the 460 Guantanamo detainees are terrorists, criminals or enemy fighters; and who are innocents, relatively, swept up in U.S. military dragnets. President George W. Bush should insist on that kind of process, whether military or civilian.

The situation wouldn't be so muddled legally if Bush had designated detainees from the fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq as prisoners of war under the Geneva Conventions, which spell out proper handling for POWs. Bush labeled them enemy combatants instead, a term devised to describe fighters who are not regular military and who pledge their allegiance to stateless organizations. That designation - along with the grandiose claim that the president alone controls the fate of enemy combatants - has sparked endless litigation, international condemnation and, according to lawyers for detainees, suicidal hopelessness behind Gitmo's fences.

The Supreme Court ruled in 2004 that detainees must be given an opportunity to challenge the factual basis for their enemy combatant designation. As a result, the military has conducted status review panels at Guantanamo that are perfunctory and themselves the subject of legal challenge.

The Supreme Court is also mulling the case of Salim Ahmed Hamdan, formerly a driver for Osama bin Laden, who has challenged the legality of his criminal trial being conducted before a military commission. Hamdan is one of only 10 Guantanamo detainees charged with crimes.

Muddying the water even more is the Detainee Treatment Act, signed into law in December to strip the courts of authority to hear detainees' habeas petitions challenging their status. The administration wants the law applied retroactively, which would put an end to detainee litigation.

All that legal wrangling is proceeding in slow motion, while detainee hunger strikes, forced feedings, attempted suicides and now successful ones have made the need for a transparent and unquestionably legal process all the more urgent.

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