Guantanamo Bay

Evan Markowitz 9/25/06

Second Paper Assignment

The political event that I attended was a speaker and then forum about the detainees in Guantanamo bay. A lawyer for an activist group of lawyers who represented the prisoners in Guantanamo bay came to talk. The issue she discussed was how the prisoners had been beat and tortured and that they were not receiving a trial. The woman focused mainly on the prisoners right to habeas corpus. Habeas Corpus is the right of the prisoner to force those who are detaining him to come up with a reason for why they are detaining him. This idea that date backs to English traditional law was clearly put in the constitution with only one clause. In the clause it says that Congress may suspend the prisoners right to habeas corpus “in case of Rebellion or Invasion (when) the public safety may require it.” There have only been four times since the constitution passed that the congressed has suspended the clause, all of them in times of war where violence was taking place.

Recently the debate has come up about whether or not the president and his executive branch could deny habeas corpus to the alleged terrorists who he had put in Guantanamo bay. The current administration has claimed that they were able to use unitary executive power to overrule the rest of the legislative and judicial branches. In 2004 the Supreme Court ruled in Hamdi v. Rumsfield that American citizens had the right to habeas corpus even if they were caught on a battlefield. The court made if clear that this meant they would get their case reviewed by a fair judge or jury. In Rasul v. Bush the court guaranteed this right to non-citizens as well and gave the right to apply for a judicial review to those who were being held in Guantanamo Bay and had already made claims for habeas corpus. The Detainee Treatment Act of 2005 began to strip the rights of individuals at Guantanamo Bay a little bit but the upcoming bill that has reached congress named Graham-Warner Military Commission Act will devastate the detainee’s rights. The act will make it so prisoners no longer have the right to habeas corpus.

The problem that the lawyer brought up was that most likely, the majority of the people at Guantanamo Bay are innocent and cannot prove this without a fair trial. The debate of the bill that is being passed is only about torture and not the right to habeas corpus. No one seems to be defending that position in congress. As Americans we declare that we are going to spread democracy through out the world yet we are becoming the worst offenders of peoples rights throughout the world. We need to give these people fair trials at least to the point where a fair appointed judge could see if the conditions are just for the alleged actions they have done. When this fair trial does occur, we must make sure that it will not leak out confidential information an impartial jury.

I believe as the United States we either need to do two things, one start to set a good example for the rest of the world for human rights or two stop acting like we are the global police. We cannot continue denying people of the rights that they should be guaranteed in the Geneva conventions. This is more than just torturing people and not giving them a trial it looking to see how we look at people. We are acting like it is all right to treat these people inhumanely. Many of these alleged terrorists have done nothing wrong and they are not getting a fair trial to prove it.

There have been many suicides because the detainees are given no information on when or if ever they will be released. This leaves them with a sense of hopelessness. They have no idea when they are going to be able to go back home so, instead of waiting and letting the interrogators torture them they are taking their own lives. The military goes on to claim that their lawyers are telling them to do so and blaming them because they are so caught up in their lies to blame themselves.

President Bush has told us that we are in a “War on Terror.” But in this war we have no clearly defined enemy and no clearly defined point of victory. Bush and the administration have avoided giving guidelines of who is to be considered enemy a combatant and who is not, so they will have the freedom to detain whomever they see fit. He has clearly stated that he believes the prisoners in Guantanamo Bay are not soldiers but captured terrorist