Na Gitmo: De verantwoordelijkheid van de Overheid
Door Aziz Huq | Na Gitmo: De Amerikaanse Overheid is juridisch Verantwoordelijk en moreel voor het Geven van Onschuldige Gevangenen het Nieuw Leven in de V.S. Het opperste Hof van de V.S. heeft nog om op de constitutionele uitdagingen te beslissen die door Guantánamo gevangenen aan hun zes-jaar-extra opsluiting worden ingediend. Het kan niet dit tot Juni doen. Maar toch stellen de politici reeds op om ervoor te zorgen dat, nochtans de regels van het Hof, een volledige remedie voor de fouten van het Beleid van Bush onmogelijk blijkt.
Vorige maand, maakte de Republikein senator SAM Brownback van Kansas een preventieve staking tegen om het even welk plan om gevangenen tot de Verenigde Staten te leiden. Antwoordend aan vage plannen aan overdrachtgevangenen aan militaire faciliteiten in Fort Leavenworth, in zijn huisstaat, debatteerde Brownback dat de logistieke en technische barrières dergelijke detentions onhaalbaar zouden maken.
Localism van Brownback verduistert meer dan het openbaart. Hij veronderstelt dat het centrale probleem van zich het afwikkelen Guantánamo hoe te de resterende gevangenen „op te slaan“ zal zijn, die hij om te gevaarlijk veronderstelt te zijn om worden bevrijd. Hij is verkeerd. Het dringendste probleem, één die zal voortduren wat het Opperste Hof, is het lot van gevangenen die in fout - onschuldige mensen zijn gegrepen die nu aan hun geboorteland niet kunnen worden teruggegeven toe te schrijven aan het risico van marteling.
Brownback heeft precies achteruit dingen. Eerder dan zich over hypothetisch schuldig in Guantánamo (voor in feite niemand zijn er vrij veroordeeld wegens om het even welke misdaad geweest) ongerust te maken, zou de prioriteit moeten zijn hoe te vrij onschuldig te behandelen.
De eerlijkste en aannemelijke oplossing voor deze gevangenen is nieuwe vestiging binnen de Verenigde Staten, een oplossing slechts een handvol moedige advocaten Guantánamo tot op heden naar heeft gestreefd. Maar toch heeft het Amerikaanse publiek om dit nog te erkennen.
Een recent rapport door het Nieuwe in York-Gebaseerde Centrum voor Constitutionele Rechten documenteert de gevallen van minstens vijftig gevangenen Guantánamo die bij zeer riskant van marteling zijn als zij aan hun geboorteland worden teruggegeven. Stelde nochtans dergelijke gevangenen bloot voordien waren, herhaaldelijk wordt gebrandmerkt aangezien de gevaarlijke terroristen door het Beleid van Bush zich hun bij-risicostatus voorbij reparatie heeft verschanst. Recente repatriations van Guantánamo aan Tunesië en Rusland hebben gevangenen naar gevangenissen met nog slechter voorwaarde-en met minder toegang tot wettelijk of humanitair verplaatst hulp-dan zij bij de Cubaanse basis hadden.
Indeed, the implausibility of safe repatriation in such circumstances is now so evident that even the conservative US Court of Appeals in Washington has held that courts can stay transfers to examine the risk of torture.
To be sure, resettlement within the United States for any of the Guantánamo detainees is a political non-starter. In a global context, moreover, it is but a small fraction of the larger failure of the United States to deal equitably with the human fallout from its national security policies. US responses to the Iraqi refugee crisis in Jordan and Syria have been far from adequate. Nor has the United States honored the loyalty of Iraqis who worked with diplomats and the military in the post-invasion period.
Yet as all of the presidential candidates have recognized, Guantánamo imposes tremendous, perhaps unique, reputational drag on the United States’s public campaigns against terrorism, and some resolution must be found.
Rather than honestly dealing with the problems thrown up by the Bush Administration’s erroneous detention decisions, the Administration and its supporters are now moving to use Guantánamo as an election-year wedge issue by advocating new “solutions” for the detainees. A preventive detention statute is high on the agenda.
Such innovations — echoes of past “solutions” for problem populations — would merely momentarily dislodge Guantánamo from the public eye. They would do nothing to solve the pressing concern of innocent detainees whom the United States refuses to release. But it is a measure of the Bush Administration’s success in shifting the terms of debate that internment akin to that used against the Japanese-Americans in World War II or against Catholics in 1970s Northern Ireland is now being touted as a compromise solution.
Nor can Guantánamo be resolved by dispersing detainees to incarcerations in new and distant prisons. Since the United States has failed to hold its allies in Pakistan, Egypt and Syria to even minimal standards of decency, despite the influence foreign aid and military cooperation bring, we have forfeited the right to absolve ourselves of responsibility for what those countries do. To claim that detainees can be returned to those countries in good conscience is risible.
In all events, the Administration has forfeited any credibility when it comes to dealing equitably and securely with detainees. Its lead should be ignored. Resolving the farrago of prideful stupidities that lead to Guantanámo means accepting that the United States has imprisoned and abused innocent men for years–and accepting this not just as an intellectual matter but also as a matter of practical morality.
Resettlement within the United States for Guantánamo detainees who were improperly detained, who the military wants to release, and who cannot be sent to their home country due to the risk of torture, should not be an impossible sell. In one case recently argued in Washington, attorneys for Chinese Uigher detainees pressed a compelling argument for that remedy. Whether or not they succeed in the courts, the Uighers’ case should prevail as a matter of public policy.
For even conservative politicians increasingly understand the need to redeem those society has cast out into jails. The Second Chance Act, which strengths post-incarceration rehabilitation programs, has many conservative supporters, including the good Senator from Kansas. But if empathy can extend to those convicted and sentenced, why should be it withheld from those who have never been convicted, except in a court of public opinion jerry-rigged by the prosecutors?
To do otherwise would be somewhat like solving the problem of wrongful convictions by re-sentencing defendants to death.
The election year will bring many proposals to “fix” Guantánamo involving preventive detention or national security courts. None of these ideas addresses the stain the prison has left on America’s reputation. None provides any hope to the wrongly imprisoned. None yields a real solution. A meaningful response accepts responsibility for the shattered lives and stolen years of wrongful imprisonment in the hands of the United States, a responsibility that can be plausibly met only by treating detainees the same way as other refugees who have no safe port of call — by opening prison doors to new lives in America.
Aziz Huq directs the liberty and national security project at New York University’s Brennan Center for Justice. He is co-author of Unchecked and Unbalanced: Presidential Power in a Time of Terror (New Press, 2007)
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Perhaps neither your readers or the rinf.com are aware that the U.S. Government held German Americans in internment in the United States long after war in Europe and in the Pacific had ended. They remained locked up as late as August 1948…the war in Europe ending in May of 1945 and in the Pacific in September of the same year.
Charges were never brought against these internees!