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The Guantanamo Suicides

A spreading stain

Editorial
The Philadelphia Inquirer
June 13, 2006

After 41/2 years, the Bush administration's preventive detention of terror suspects in Cuba has become an embarrassment and an affront to the ideals expressed in the Declaration of Independence.

Consider how today's reality at the Guantanamo military prison clashes with the nation's bedrock ideals:

We hold these truths to be self-evident...

After the suicides of three Gitmo detainees over the weekend, the bed in every cage-like cell will be stripped of linens at daybreak.

That all men are created equal...

Detainees will be checked visually every 30 seconds; in effect, they will never be left alone. Hunger strikers will be bound and force-fed through tubes inserted through the nose.

That they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights ...

The suicides were "not an act of desperation, but rather [were] an act of asymmetric warfare waged against us." - statement of Rear Adm. Harry Harris, prison commander.

That among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness...

Even those who believe something that is very unlikely - that every last one of the 460 detainees still at Gitmo was a key aide to Osama bin Laden - should be deeply troubled by the continued detentions.

As Thomas Jefferson wrote, certain basic rights belong to all people simply by virtue of being human. At Gitmo and other "war on terror" prisons, that principle is being trampled. The damage being done to American values in the name of safeguarding American lives may be hard to calculate. But it's real.

Long before the triple suicide, the sorry saga of Guantanamo called into question whether the White House's lawless policy on detainees was doing more harm than good to Americans' security. Gitmo may be a better recruitment tool for al-Qaeda than it is a source of useful intelligence.

It should be beyond debate that it's wrong for a democracy that extols human rights to hold men indefinitely without charge or due process.

More than 300 Gitmo detainees have been released, many of them determined to have had no connection to terrorism. Only a handful of the others have been charged under the justice-lite provisions of a military tribunal system.

By killing themselves, the three detainees did force at least one change in Defense Department behavior. Pentagon officials suddenly became positively chatty about the backgrounds of the three, saying they all had significant links to al-Qaeda or the Taliban. They gave more detail about the dead men than about most who are still held in this shadowland.

Let's agree that some of those who remain were bad actors. But nearly five years after they were swept up, how much could they know about what al-Qaeda is now up to? Do we plan to hold them all in this legal black hole until they die, of natural causes or their own hand?

To reclaim its honor, the nation must set a policy to empty Gitmo over time - trying those against whom there's a legitimate case, and negotiating the safe return of others to their home countries.

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