LAST WEEK, a United Nations report on the United States' prison camp at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, accused the U.S. of inhumane treatment of detainees and called for its closure. America needs to look at this recommendation seriously if it wants to be viewed as a protector of liberty and democracy in the world. While the Bush administration is right in pointing out that the detainees in Guantánamo cannot simply be released, the U.S. government must also give a fair trial to those held there.
The United States has certain rights and responsibilities in dealing with prisoners like those held in Cuba. According to the UN report, the Geneva Convention relative to the treatment of prisoners of war allows a nation in an armed conflict to detain those people who pose a threat to its safety until the end of the conflict. The report clarifies, however, that the convention does not allow nations to hold detainees indefinitely simply for the purpose of interrogation.
The first problem with the U.S. camp in Cuba is that not all of the prisoners there came from an area in which the U.S. is involved in an armed conflict. Six men of Algerian descent were handed over to the U.S. by the Bosnian government in 2002, according to a BBC report. Although these men and others in Guantánamo were arrested on suspicion of terrorism, they are not truly prisoners of war.
While, the U.S. claims to be at war with "terrorism," it cannot use that claim to treat any terrorist as a prisoner of war. The U.S. would argue that this war is something new, because it is against a trans-national group, but it is not the first time that the U.S. has fought such a group. The U.S. has been battling drug cartels in Latin America for over a decade. Those criminals are taken prisoner and tried for the crimes that they have committed. The U.S. must likewise try those terrorists arrested for crimes not connected to Iraq or Afghanistan as normal criminals. Otherwise, the U.S. could justify treating any criminal as a prisoner of war. Moreover, the fact that members of al-Qaeda do not wear uniforms only makes trials more important. The U.S. should be concerned not only with letting terrorists go free, but also with arresting innocents.
Even those prisoners who clearly are prisoners of war deserve better treatment than they have received in Cuba. Regardless of whether claims of torture and other inhumane treatments are true, the detainees there have been denied any legal options -- in many cases, for years. They have not been tried for any crimes. It is entirely likely that there are innocent men detained there.
In the United States, the Constitution guarantees the right to a fair and speedy trial to prove guilt. While it is true that this right does not apply to non-citizens, it is still a principle that is central to the American idea of justice. On June 28, 2004, the Supreme Court ruled in Rasul v. Bush that detainees at Guantánamo have a right to be tried. To deny that right to these prisoners is a betrayal of justice.
In response to the U.N. report, Defense Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld argued that the U.S. has "several hundred terrorists, bad people, people if they went back out on the field would try to kill Americans." While it is probably an oversimplification to call the terrorists "bad people," Rumsfeld is right. The terrorists held at Guantánamo cannot simply be released. Rumsfeld skirts the issue, however, by assuming that all of the detainees are guilty. Assuming he is right and they all are guilty, Rumsfeld should have no reason to fear putting the detainees on trial.
Even if they were tried, the most that the Geneva Conventions allow is for the U.S. to hold the detainees until the end of the armed conflict. The Conventions allow an occupation like the one in Iraq and Afghanistan to be defined as such a conflict. It is therefore wrong to argue that all the prisoners should be released, but the U.S. must define when they will release these men. The real danger behind Bush's declaration of war on "terror" is that a victory is difficult to define. "Terror" is not going to sign surrender papers. Traditionally, the U.S. could only define members of the Taliban's army as soldiers of a foreign nation, and would thus have to release them after the war with that nation is over -- but the Bush administration has not defined the end of this war. It seems unlikely that they ever will, given the tremendous popularity boost that the war has given the administration.
The detainees at Guantánamo, then, have no hope unless the camp is drastically changed. The Bush administration, however, has no plan for dealing with the detainees at the base. In the meantime, the U.S. will continue to be seen as hypocritically denying the Western ideals it pretends to champion. As with so many other occasions of late, the administration has gotten itself in a mess for which it has no exit strategy.
Daniel Colbert is a Cavalier Daily Viewpoint Writer.
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