Guantanamo Bay Prisoners' Lawyers Condemn Bush Administration
Guantanamo Bay Prisoners' Lawyers Condemn Bush Administration
WASHINGTON - Lawyers representing some of the hundreds of prisoners held at Guantanamo Bay have angrily condemned efforts by the Bush administration to make it more difficult for them to visit their clients. The lawyers say restrictions already in place make their jobs all but impossible.The US Justice Department has requested that a federal court impose tighter restrictions on the lawyers, claiming their visits with prisoners have "caused intractable problems and threats to security at Guantánamo". In a brief to the court the department claims information passed from prisoners to their lawyers and then given to the media.
Lawyers representing some of the 385 prisoners still held at the US Naval base on Cuba yesterday reacted angrily to the accusations leveled by the department. They said what was really driving the request was the US government's desire to further diminish the already severely limited scrutiny that Guantanamo receives.
Clive Stafford Smith, legal director of the UK-based group Reprieve which represents several dozen prisoners, said of the claims: "They say the lawyers have caused unrest, they say we have caused hunger strikes. This is monumental crap. They say we are inciting them. Of course, we have talked to them about their hunger strikes - that is our jobs. But the hunger strikes are done in reaction to their treatment. And any information we gather has to go through the censors."
He added: "This is being done to stop information coming out of Guantanamo. It's being done to stop any journalists finding out what they did to Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and others." Under the proposals, filed earlier this month in Washington DC, lawyers would be restricted to just three visits with an existing client, correspondence they sent to their clients would be vetted by military intelligence officers and government officials would be empowered to prevent lawyers from having access to secret evidence used by military tribunals to decide whether the prisoners were "enemy combatants".
Ever since the prison opened in January 2002 - established to hold alleged suspects rounded up in the so-called war on terror - Guantanamo Bay has been the focus of controversy and countless claims of abuse and torture.
Three British prisoners who were eventually released without charge said they were abused and mistreated.The Bush administration has sought to restrict the amount of information available about the prisoners and their treatment. When alleged 9/11 plotters Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and other "high value targets" went before tribunals to assess their status in March, all lawyers and journalists were banned from the proceedings on the grounds of national security. Mr Mohammed - who according to a Pentagon transcript of the proceedings claimed responsibility for a series of terror attacks - said he had suffered abuse at the hands of the CIA.
A Justice Department spokesman yesterday declined to comment on the request, saying the filing to the court should speak for itself. Part of that filing claimed: "There is no right on the part of counsel to access to detained aliens on a secure military base in a foreign country."
But lawyers said the government was trying to refuse the prisoners a basic legal right. Jonathan Hafetz of the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University, told the New York Times: "These rules are an effort to restore Guantánamo to its prior status as a legal black hole."
Campaigners have long been fighting for the prisoners to be brought to trial or else released. They appeared to have won a victory last summer when the Supreme Court ruled that they had the right to challenge their detention. However, the Bush administration passed new legislation to circumvent the ruling.
© 2007 Independent News and Media Limited
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"If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stomping on a human face forever."
George Orwell
1984
The Guantanamo torture dungeons are despicable under any circumstance. The tactics are reminiscent of that which occurred under the auspices of the Roman Popes and his Grand Inquisitor. Torture, confession then turn them over to the flames to be released from their sins.
Maat, Best Wishes and Hope
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tk1vEuhBuEU
I made a lengthy comment, which seems to be hanging in the buffer. Before this discussion is over, I re-posted my comments on my website, www.raycarlson.com
In response to the comment above from "hybridoma2001", I'm not really so certain that the USA has ever completely been a "beacon of light", except in comparison to the darkness of Nazi Germany during World War II. And right after the war, we brought all those Nazi scientists over here, gave them high paying jobs and had them help us fight the Communists and land men on the moon.
Remember that this entire nation was stolen from the people who lived here first, and that we committed genocide against these people. Therefore, many or most are not around to remind us of what we have done against them. The difference between the USA and Germany is that the latter finally faced its own ugly past, while we are still in denial. If you doubt this, I ask you to tell when the last (or first) time was that you heard the term "genocide" to describe United States policy toward the Indians?
Ever since the creation of the Monroe Doctrine, the United States has asserted overtly and covertly the right to rape Latin America, whether it be in the name of Protectionism, Colonialism, or the War on Drugs. We have installed one dictator after another while we have provided funding for antidemocratic juntas. We continue to wipe out crops all throughout the coca-producing nations, ignoring all the while the long-term health consequences faced by natives from our use of a defoliants combined with surfactants.
Lest we EVEN think that our imperial tendencies are restricted to Latin America alone, let us begin to contemplate what we have done to ruin the mideast. For instance, in Iran we installed the Shah, then placed him back in power after he was democratically defeated. In Iraq, beginning with the "Let's you and him fight" foreign policy between that nation and Iran, continuing to today's shameful occupation of a nation that never even pretended to threaten us, we have had blood on our hands. When it comes down to it, our propaganda has never been supported by our actions, and I defy any intelligent, informed person to demonstrate otherwise.
I realize that this will be a bitter pill to swallow. Everyone wants to be "proud to be American," but what does that mean? Many were proud to be Roman even after the Romans conquered Carthage and were rumored to have sewn the soil with salt so as to ruin Carthaginian crops. Many Romans considered themselves to be simply passive spectators as they watched humans being murdered in the Circus Maximus to appease their bloodlust. But if we do not begin to acknowledge America's myth, how will we ever live up to the legend?
In many ways, I consider the destruction of the World Trade Center to have been a larger-than-life omen portending the fall of the post modern-day Towers of Babylon. Our nation had become so incredibly insular and irresponsible in its policies of manipulation and hegemony, executed with impunity, that we incurred the rage of terrorists. What we were unwilling to even mention at the time is that terrorism itself is a term to describe what goes by the name "policy" when it is practiced by our own government against the rest of the world. We have already killed many more of our own GIs than perished in the events of September 11th, to say nothing of Iraqi deaths which easily outnumber our own deaths 10 to 1.
If we go back to the Iran hostage situation during the Carter Administration, we can see how the rage of nations across the Mideast has been simmering over time, due to our very own policies against these nations.
I for one will not rest until the standard history book in the public schools becomes Howard Zinn's "A People's History of the United States." None of this is to say that we can't become great and just and noble as a society, but that we have to acknowlege that the cancer within our nation did not begin under George W. Bush, but merely metastasized. It took the entire nation of Germany to produce the environment that gave rise to a man such as Adolf Hitler. Likewise, it took the entire American village to raise an idiot like Dubya and then make him their Commander In-Chief.
A few days ago, I watched the Bill Moyers special on the press's role in selling the war to us. What even Bill Moyers missed, or was afraid to say, is that what we have received from the press all along has not been merely misinformation, but disinformation. The difference is that misinformation is unintentional, whereas disinformation is deliberate. It is well-known if you go back far enough into the history of the Bush administration that it had its own version of Orwell's "Ministry of Truth," but that it quickly became an albatross around the neck of the administration and therefore was subsequently discredited, at least on the surface. Follow these links for more information:
http://www.lewrockwell.com/roberts/roberts13.html
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2002/07/28/IN244190.DTL
http://www.commondreams.org/views06/0203-29.htm
What we need is a US Citizen's Constitutional revival. Every US citizen and noncitizen needs to be armed with a copy of the US Constitution. Every time we do not follow its principles, citizens need to point it out. Leaving it up to the Supreme Court alone to interpret this lay person's guerilla document is exactly like leaving it up to the Catholic Church to interpret the word of God. Ever since the invention of the printing press, the power of the Church to oppress people has been kept in check. Today's printing press is the Internet. May it enlighten us all to the current state of human affairs, so that we may create social justice from the grass roots up.
This is a trial balloon for the descent into fascism that this country is plunging into. If the Bush Reich can get the American people to tolerate this in the name of "national security," then it is just a matter of time before they go after whoever they claim are "dissidents" who are ainding and abetting "the enemy."
You may think that this can't happen here, but who will stop them?
George Bush is holding our troops hostage in Iraq. The ransom he demands from the American people is enough money to secure the oil fields long enough to divide them among his friends.
Someone better send out for pizza and cigarettes before he kills them all.
I know this is nothing new that I'm going to print here but I just have to say, "What the hell happened to the USA as a world leader and so called beacon of light."
Bush and all others know that at most there are probably fewer than a dozen people who deservere to be. But even if all the other prisoners being held who are actually innocent were released, that doesn't mean that the USA need resort to this type of justice - which is no justice.
I'm disgusted and ashamed of my country. There is no reason- ever- to treat any human this way. All this administration is trying to do at this point is hide the truth as much as possible about as many things as possible.
The impeachment proceedings should have begun months ago.
http://www.minutemanmedia.org/CARTOON%20020707%20FULL%20SIZE.htm
What is so often misunderstood about dozens of the prisoners ag Guantanamo Bay, which is really just an island in the prisoner Gulag the Bush adminsitration is running; they are innocent bystanders who were swept up in drag net operations that were run to fill quotas so the Bush people could put on a show for the 'war on terror.' This god forsaken show is harming hundreds of men's lives, separating them from their loved ones and is doing irreparable damage to our constitutional form of government.
We no longer live in a democracy, or lets say, the hint of democracy we once had is being blown away, bit by bit, in the form of disempowerment that Guantanamo represents in a cushing manner.