In the last days most of the talk in the US is about health care. I already wrote about it on June 29th and on July 9th and with the many and very different proposals being on the table at the moment, I intend to keep a close track on the new developments. In the meanwhile, I want to go back to Guantanamo, which Obama had said he wanted closed. That is proving as well to be more difficult that it was thought. To the point that the Obama administration fearing a battle with Congress which could delay the plans to close the prison and claiming that Congress is forcing his hand is thinking about an executive order that would reassert presidential authority to incarcerate terrorism suspects indefinitely. Such an order would follow claims by former president George W. Bush that people can be detained without trial for long periods under the laws of war. This is going to anger many people who believe that President Obama should not go that way and should respect the US constitution and its protection of human rights, its assumption of innocence, and its fairness.
And as this was not disturbing enough, there is an article which appeared in the German magazine Spiegel about Lakhdar Boumediene a 43-year-old Algerian who spent the last seven and a half years in Guantanamo. Held there because he was suspected of being a terrorist, he was tortured under the Bush administration. In 2008 his name become known when the US Supreme Court handed down a historic decision in his favor in a case with his name on it: Boumediene vs. George W. Bush. The decision invalidated the special laws of the Bush administration. Since then, like ordinary prisoners, Guantanamo detainees have a right to habeas corpus, which allows them to petition a US federal court to review the grounds for their detention. With that and the arrival of the Obama administration, a time when Boumediene was still in Guantanamo, things should have been more human for the detainees. And yet, Boumediene who was freed on May 15 and is now living in France, has told Spiegel that the abuse and humiliation of prisoners continues in Guantanamo and that detainees there are still harassed and tortured. According to Boumediene, a special guard unit continues to beat prisoners to get them out of their cells, and any official claims that such treatment has stopped are untrue. His claims are bound to trigger controversy in the United States. Boumediene attorney, Robert Kirsch, has said that Boumediene was “kept isolated there” for 10 days, until Feb. 10, and was “not permitted to shower, pray or change his clothes. He was force fed using violent methods that were intended to and did injure him, and there was no medical treatment” for a foot injury. The US Department of Defense denies all these accusations; it claims that they are unfounded and that procedures at Guantanamo have been reviewed.
“We never imagined that detainee abuse would continue after Jan. 20,” says Michael Ratner, the head of the New York-based Center for Constitutional Rights. Ratner coordinates the legal defense of Guantanamo detainees. Across the ocean, the London-based organization Reprieve is now calling for an independent investigative commission to be appointed.
We expect that Boumediene’s claims will be investigated.
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