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In Legal Limbo: GuantanamoBay Detainees Need to be Given POW Status or Face Charges
Editorial
The Columbus Dispatch
May 25, 2006
May 25--The U.S. lockup at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, continues to be a liability for a nation that strives to be a world leader in protecting individual rights. A U.N. human-rights panel again has called for the prison camp's closing and said that the indefinite jailing of suspects without charges amounts to torture.
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice responded that the United States would be "delighted" to close the naval-base prison if it had some place to put the nearly 500 suspects held there. She described them as people "who have vowed to kill more Americans if they are released."
In the short term, the United States might have no adequate alternative, but the sooner this prison can be closed, the better. The Guantanamo jail and the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq have become symbols of U.S. mistreatment of detainees.
A key to replacing the Guantanamo site would be the assurance that relocated detainees have prisoner-of-war protections or a right to a trial. President Bush repeatedly refers to the U.S. struggle against terrorism as a war.
If this is a war, then it follows that captives seized in Afghanistan and other countries are prisoners of war.
Because of their designation as "unlawful combatants," the detainees are neither captured warriors nor defendants subject to a trial. The cases of only a few Guantanamo detainees have been referred to military tribunals for hearings. The rest remain in legal limbo.
After the 9/11 attacks, a U.S.-led military coalition cast a wide net for suspects. Some of them were innocent. More than 200 detainees have been freed from Guantanamo because they had no apparent connections to al-Qaida or the Taliban.
Much of the international criticism of the United States stems from the rough interrogation techniques that were made illegal by the 2005 McCain amendment that bars "cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment" of prisoners held anywhere by U.S. forces. The techniques include waterboarding, a near-drowning method of inducing prisoners to talk; sleep deprivation; sexual humiliation; and using dogs to intimidate detainees. But even more of a concern to human-rights advocates is the un-American idea of holding suspects indefinitely without POW status or a way to challenge their detention.
The United States lost some of its sense of domestic security on Sept. 11, 2001. The attacks should not destroy this nation's standards for protecting human rights.
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