Guantanamo inmates in legal void
2003-09-10 09:52
Washington - For nearly two years, US President George W Bush's administration has kept hundreds of prisoners of the war on terror at its naval base in Guantanamo, Cuba, leaving them in a legal void that is beginning to worry US lawyers.
"A rogue justice!" exclaims Michael Ratner, an attorney for the Centre for Constitutional Rights, playing off the state department's expression "rogue states" for countries that support terrorism.
One of his clients, a British national captured in Afghanistan, insists he has been able to see the sun for only seven minutes in the last seven months and does not even know he has an attorney.
"Moazzam Begg was allowed to read only one letter sent by his parents," says Ratner, who is also defending Australian prisoner David Hicks.
Begg is among the 660 people from 42 countries, kept behind barbed wire at the camp, whose fate is unclear.
The Bush administration has refused to grant them prisoner of war status as outlined by the Geneva conventions.
Until the war ends
Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has made it clear that people will remain in detention until the war on terror ends.
"The prisoners find themselves in a grey zone where military justice overlaps with civil law, because the Bush administration is working on procedural issues to justify these extended detentions without due process," explains American University professor Emilio Vianno, a specialist in international law.
This argument is refuted by the military, which insists that war-time cases can be handled by military tribunals.
"It is very easy to criticise a process that you've not seen in action or that's new," argues Major John Smith, a military judge attached to a Pentagon office that deals with military commissions.
"The intention of the rules is to provide... a full and fair trial yet still protect our national security information."
Laughable
Law professor Jonathan Turley from George Washington University calls the military rules "laughable."
"They give the appearance of legal process without any substance," Turley continues. "The tribunal is in fact designed to guarantee convictions."
More than 20 months after the prison camp was established in Guantanamo in the wake of September 11, and after the US government announced its intention to use military tribunals, the prisoners cannot meet their lawyers, no legal procedure has been established, and no date for opening trials has been set.
No basic rights
"It is not by chance that the United States chose Guantanamo for this camp," argues professor Vianno. "It allows the government not to apply to these prisoners the basic rights spelled out in the US Constitution."
Journalists who have visited Guantanamo say a courtroom is being set up in a building on the base.
The detainees are subjected to "continuous interrogations with the promising of a reward system, promising some ridiculous thing like a hamburger," says Michael Ratter. "The psychological and physical state of people is really pretty bad."
Prisoners have already made 32 suicide attempts.
According to Ratter, the detainees for the most part are locked up 24 hours a day in tiny cells.
They can exercise for only 15 minutes two or three times a week.