Posted by
Leonard Nolt on Saturday, June 14, 2008 2:11:24 PM
In his column, "A Supreme Error" on June 13, Fred Thompson foolishly critizes the Supreme Court for restoring basic human rights to the prisoners at Guantanamo Bay. In the Boumediene vs Bush opinion the court, by an ominous 5-4 decision, decided that the prisoners, most who have been held for years without charges and no evidence of any guilt, should have their habeous corpus right restored. The "ominous" aspect of this decision is that it was not unanimous.
What the court is doing is recognizing these prisoners as human beings, something the Bush Administration has refused to do. As humans under the control of a democracy they have the right to be considered innocent until proven guilty. The decision by the court will force the Bush Adminnistration to reveal the evidence thay have against these prisoners, which probably won't happen because, for most of them, there isn't any. It will also require the Bush Administration to provide information about how the prisoners were treated. The name Guantanamo is already synonmous with torture and abuse of innocent human being. The prediction is that the prisoners will soon be released, since revealing information about evidence of wrongoing by inmates, or inmate treatment at Guantanamo can only be embarrassing to the Bush Administration and anyone who has supported it, including Republican presidential candidate John McCain.
Most of the prisoners at Guantanamo have been there for more than five years in close to total isolation. They've been imprisoned without charges, without a trial, or the most basic protections of the Geneva Convention. All of the prisoners are Muslim. Those facts alone prove that this is a stiuation reeking with injustice and discrimination, a situation in which the basic tenants of freedom and democracy are being violated by the Bush Administration and those who support it. All the prisoners are family members, and have been torn from their parents, children, wives, and other family members by the military violence of an attacking, invading, and occupying superpower. We know from the award-winning documentary, Taxi to the Dark Side, that US soldiers in Afghainstan were paying local officials to apprehend people and turn them over to the US military. Some of those imprisoned were tortured and killed in Afghanistan. Others were shipped to Guantanamo for similar treatment.
During the time that the prisoners were in Guantanamo, they "had been repeatedly abused. They had been subjected to stress positions, sleep deprivation, blaring music, and extremes of heat and cold during endless interrogations. They had been sexually humiliated, their physical space invaded by female interrogators who taunted them, fully aware of the insult they were meting out to devout Muslims. They were denied basic medical care. They were broken down and psychologically traumatized, kept in extreme isolation, threatened with rendition, interrogated at gunpoint, and told that their families would be harmed if they refused to talk." ( from the notes by Marc Falkoff in the book Poems from Guantanamo: The Detainees Speak).
The treatment of detainees at Guantanamo teaches us that our own freedoms and liberties as citizens of the USA are in a very fragile state. Any administration willing to imprison, torture, abuse, and hold humans indefinitely without evidence, charges, or a trial is an administration that has little or no respect for the rights of any human being. The Bush Administration's treatment of detainees at Guanatanamo is a threat to the freedoms of all Americans. When a Republican and former presidential candidate Fred Thompson defends the Bush Administration's abuse of human rights, it's clear that another Republican Administration will continue to undermine the liberties and freedoms that made this country great.