[Mb-civic] Close Guantanamo now - Boston Globe Editorial

[William Swiggard]

  Close Guantanamo now

February 10, 2006  |  The Boston Globe

THE NEW chancellor of Germany, Angela Merkel, was expected to sweeten 
relations with the United States that had been strained by her 
predecessor's outspoken opposition to the Iraq war. But in her first 
meeting with President Bush last month she gave him this unsolicited 
advice: Close down the detention center at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba.

Just how wise her council was becomes clearer with every revelation 
about the purgatory the United States has created for hundreds of 
individuals swept up during the Afghanistan war more than four years 
ago. So far, the government has managed to bring criminal charges 
against just a handful of the detainees. The rest are held thousands of 
miles from their homes and families with no prospect of any resolution 
of their cases.

Not surprisingly, many are driven to go on hunger strikes. Concerned 
that starvation deaths would further discredit US policy toward the 
detainees, US officers take extreme steps to keep the strikers alive 
with force-feeding. According to US officials interviewed by The New 
York Times, plastic tubes are forced down prisoners' throats and they 
are strapped into special ''restraint chairs" for hours on end. These 
keep them from intentionally vomiting after a force-feeding. A detainee 
lawyer told the Times that one of his clients said officials would 
purposely insert so much food that prisoners would defecate on themselves.

Many of the detainees are undoubtedly terrorists or supporters of the 
Taliban, who continue to foment trouble in parts of Afghanistan. In such 
cases, tribunals meeting due process standards should be held. If 
detainees are found guilty they should be sentenced and transferred to 
prisons in Afghanistan. There is a risk they would escape, like the Al 
Qaeda members who broke out of a Yemeni prison last week, but that risk 
is eclipsed by the continuing black eye the United States suffers 
internationally by holding some 500 detainees in indefinite confinement.

The most heart-rending cases are the dozen or so Chinese Muslim Uighurs 
at Guantanamo. Captured at a time when the United States was offering 
Afghans $5,000 bounties for detainees, the Uighurs have even been 
declared by the US government not to be enemy combatants. But the 
government does not want to send them back to China, where Uighurs are 
persecuted, and won't give them asylum status that would allow them to 
join a small Uighur community near Washington, D.C. So they stay in 
their cells.

Merkel's advice to Bush that he close Guantanamo might have been 
unwelcome, but it came from a friend. Every day this script by Franz 
Kafka and Joseph Heller goes on, the United States loses credibility as 
a champion of human rights.

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/editorials/articles/2006/02/10/close_guantanamo_now/
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