Guantanamo

I tuned into the BBC’s Panorama last night, which consisted of an investigation into Camp Delta at Guantanamo and also the conditions under which detainees are held in Afghanistan itself. Whilst Panorama can be a sensationalist programme with a definite agenda, the specific allegations made can’t easily be wished away or dismissed as biased or malicious. Many of these are familiar to people, but I was sufficiently engaged by the broadcast to want to rehearse them here. I’m going from my memory of the programme, so I may have missed some details. The points raised included:

bq. That numbers of people have been detained in Guantanamo after being denounced by their enemies and business rivals as a means of settling petty scores. (When the baselessness of the charges against them became clear, they were simply dumped back in Afghanistan to pick up their lives as best they could.)

bq. That people have been arrested and handed over to the US in other sovereign states (Pakistan, the Gambia, and Bosnia) and have been denied habeas corpus and other remedies available in the legal systems of those countries.

bq. That those detained in Guantanamo have no clear legal status and are denied access to the legal remedies available either in international law or US law. This as a result of the fact that the US will not recognize them as POWs and uses the fact that Guantanamo is in Cuba (though wholly under US control) to deny them access to the US courts.

bq. That the prospect of trials under US military procedure with right of appeal only to the President of the US (who has already publicly declared the detainees to be “bad people”) is a breach of the human rights of the detainees and of natural justice. (And some of the trials under these flawed procedures may issue in the death penalty.)

bq. That conditions in Camp Delta, confined to cages, punished for talking to one another, subject to lights all night long, and without news or the prospect of have cases determined in the foreseeable future, places intolerable stresses on the inmates. This may amount to torture, legally speaking. There have been over 30 suicide attempts in Guantanamo.

bq. Children as young as 13 are held in Guantanamo.

bq. That if Camp Delta is bad, detention in Afghanistan is worse, that detainees there may not get access to the Red Cross at all, that there have been deaths certified as “homicide” by US military doctors and that those deaths do not appear to be being vigorously investigated.

Representatives of the US government who appeared on the programme defended these methods and procedures on the basis that the United States needs to defend itself against international terrorism. So it does. But it is manifestly obvious that the ways in which these detentions fall short of what is required by international law and by the human rights of the detainees cannot be justified by the right of self defence. For example, to give these people proper access to legal representation, to try them according to procedures that meet minimal standards or fairness and to give them the expectation that all of this would happen within a reasonable timescale would hardly threaten the national security of the US or of any other country involved in the Afghan coalition.

Both liberals and libertarians affirm a universality of basic rights: rights pertain to humans as such. Many of people who think of themselves as liberal or libertarian supported the war in Afghanistan partly in the name of that universalism. One of the consequences of that universalism has to be that we also champion the human rights of our enemies, and of those who seek to destroy us. That said, numbers of those in Guantanamo may not be our
enemies at all, just the victims of vengeful neighbours who coveted their shop, their house or their farm.