Still the injustice of Gitmo goes on, while the media obsess over the primaries and a candidate’s eyebrow raised here or a tone of voice lowered there. But the media rarely ask the candidates about what they plan to do about routine kidnap, detention and torture.
Lawyers for Guantanamo detainees often argue that their clients are being held based on thin intelligence, but Kurnaz’s case is the first where the record clearly shows that evidence of innocence was ignored to justify his continued detention. His story, pieced together from intelligence reports, newly declassified Pentagon documents, and secret testimony before the German Parliament—much of it never before reported in the United States—offers a rare window into the workings of the secretive system used to hold and try terrorism suspects.
It seems there are more rare windows into those workings, in the shape of fifty videotapes of CIA interrogations that Busco inadvertently failed to get wiped, (with their usual combination of evil and incompetence). There’s ten months to go of this. How much more?
Lawyers for Gitmo detainees endorse Obama as the best choice to reverse Bushco War on Terror detention policies to “restore the rule of law, demonstrate our commitment to human rights, and repair our reputation in the world community.”
Hillary Clinton has yet to give a definitive answer on what she’ll do about Gitmo – and more importantly what she’ll do about an intelligence and security apparatus that knows no restraint under Bushco.
Hillary boasts of her wealth of foreign policy experience, gained on the right-hand (so to speak) of the president. That would include experience of enabling Gitmo and the kidnap and detention of inocent men like Murat Kurmar, then?
It was the Clinton administration that established the precedent for Camp X-ray when it jailed Haitians for having AIDS, says Pauline Park at Visible Vote ’08:
In the wake of the September 1991 military coup that ousted Haiti’s first democratically elected president, the U.S. Coast Guard interdicted thousands of Haitian refugees who’d fled their country by boat and brought them to Guantánamo Bay. In 1992, the last year of his first and only term, George H.W. Bush ordered 300 of these Haitian refugees who had tested positive for HIV detained indefinitely without access to lawyers and held in leaky barracks behind razor wire. When Bill Clinton came into office, he continued the detention of these Haitian refugees.
Bill Clinton had won election in November 1992 as The Man from Hope, but to the Haitians in the AIDS death camp at Guantánamo, the situation looked hopeless until Harold Hongju Koh, a Yale University law professor, began working on their case with a group of his students. Brandt Goldstein documents the extraordinary story in his book, Storming the Court: How a Band of Yale Law Students Sued the President — and Won (Scribner 2005). In partnership with New York lawyer Michael Ratner, Koh and his students filed suit on behalf of the Haitian refugees. The Clinton Justice Department responded by moving to get the case dismissed and to have Yale and Koh punished with financial sanctions.
“Plaintiffs have been trying to use the courts to decide matters of national security, in place of the Defense Department, the Department of State, and the president himself,” Justice Department attorney Scott Dunn declared in arguing for the Clinton administration in federal court. “The courts have already decided that’s improper,” Dunn asserted, anticipating arguments that the Bush administration has made in defending the indefinite detention regime at Guantánamo since 2001.
Don’t look to another President Clinton to close Gitmo or stop rendition.
