Beyond Gitmo

Beyond Gitmo

Right-wing leaders from Dick Cheney to Rush Limbaugh are tripping over one another in an effort to be crowned the loudest and shrillest defender of torture and religious degradation. Although both the Pentagon and the FBI have confirmed mistreatment of prisoners and abuse of the Muslim holy book at Guantanamo Bay, the vice president offered these choice words of moral clarity about our actions: “I think these people have been treated far better than they could expect to be treated by virtually any other government on Earth." Right-wing yakker Rush Limbaugh painted the detention center as the picture of religious freedom, stating that Gitmo "may be a great vacation spot for oppressed Christians in the United States." While Rush is packing his bags for warmer climes, progressives have figured out a better way to ensure America’s security and moral authority.

• Shut down Gitmo and shift detainee operations to the U.S. Disciplinary Barracks at Ft. Leavenworth, Kansas. The primary justification bypassing existing U.S. military detention centers has been nullified by the Supreme Court’s assertion of jurisdiction over Guantanamo. There is no longer any excuse for bypassing sanctioned, U.S. detention centers. Ft. Leavenworth was established as the U.S. Disciplinary Barracks in 1874 and currently houses over 1,000 inmates from all the branches of the armed services. It personnel are the best trained and most experienced in managing a prison population in the U.S. military.
  
  
• Hold hearings for all detainees under Article 5 of the Geneva Conventions. When the Supreme Court rejected President Bush's attempt to pick and choose to whom the Geneva Conventions applied, the administration established combatant status review tribunals as a substitute for the Article 5 hearings of the Geneva Conventions. But earlier this year, declaring that detainees have been denied the "most basic fundamental rights," a federal judge ruled that "the Bush administration must allow [Guantanamo] prisoners...to contest their detention in U.S. courts, concluding that special military reviews established by the Pentagon as an alternative are illegal." This legal tangoing needs to end. To provide clarity in the status of the detainees and to forestall any similar rulings from the courts, all detainees should be given Article 5 hearings.
  
  
• Ensure that all future interrogations of detainees follow U.S. Army guidelines. All of the abuses of detainees in the war on terrorism have resulted from decisions by the Bush administration to change the rules, whether it is in the abandonment of the Geneva Conventions or the rejection of traditional interrogation practices. Those abuses have severely damaged our ability to wage a successful war on terrorism and have not produced valuable information. Interrogations of suspected terrorists should be governed by the Army Field Manual on Intelligence Interrogation. It would return interrogations to the proven and humane practices that have been developed through decades of experience by U.S. military personnel.