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Guantanamo: What the World
Should Know
Michael Ratner and Ellen Ray collaborate in an animated dialogue in the book, arguing that the idea that law must "bend to necessity" counters all commitments to international law. Though the US Supreme Court, in its 2004 ruling, has disallowed the indefinite incarceration of "enemy combatants", arguing for the primary necessity of habeas corpus as an essential norm for rule of justice, there seems to be no end in sight to the unchecked brutality at these centers of detention. Undeniably, an opportunity has been lost; the attack on the Twin Towers should have been an impetus to the rapprochement with the Muslim world and not a reason for the promulgation of the harsh and undemocratic Patriot Act. This is a draconian curb on civil rights at home and a strategy for intensifying hegemony abroad. The end result of this tragedy is Guantanamo, which has over the years metamorphosed from being a symbol of liberty and freedom to a place synonymous with prolonged detention without access to due processes of law. Ratner explains lucidly the history of colonial intervention into Cuba. Under the pretence of helping the Cubans, America entered a war with the Spanish and on their defeat imposed its military control over Cuba. With the Platt Amendment in 1901, the US was allowed only a military base in Cuba which led to America leasing the Guantanamo Bay for $4085 a year. The lease provided that the area would be used only as a coaling station, which the US has noticeably flouted. Terry Waite, the humanitarian activist who was arrested in 1987 and kept in solitary confinement in Beirut for over four years, writes in the Foreword to the book about his detention in Guantanamo: like the other prisoners, he too was blindfolded, shackled and subjected to interrogation under "forceful methods" of physical duress and psychological manipulation. He is of the opinion that in some respects, the "Guantanamo Bay represents a victory for the terrorists, for they have succeeded in robbing the US of that which is most precious in American society, namely respect for freedom, justice and the rule of law". In contravention of the Geneva Convention of 1949, which bans all interrogation camps, the Guantanamo Bay is a Pentagon experiment at setting up nothing more than such a camp. Further, the Third Geneva Convention requires the setting up of "competent" tribunals to settle all disputes regarding POWs. However, US President George W. Bush deems all prisoners at Guantanamo Bay as "unlawful combatants" implying that they are not soldiers but spies, terrorists or the like." The denial of the prisoners-of-war status to the detainees has left a blemish on the legal stature of the US judiciary. Bush has the last word and supersedes the judicial state machinery. For him, "to follow law is to be weak in the face of terrorism". The book gives documentary evidence, including the White House Fact Sheets as well a excerpts from the Geneva Conventions to throw light on how America’s foreign policy has resulted in atrocities committed by the military captors. In a contemporary society, it is difficult to conceive that the US has an offshore penal colony that prevents any judicial intervention as protection from the arbitrary military tribunals. The freedom-conscious citizens of America and the rest of the world need to be outraged about Guantanamo. It is an embarrassment to the US citizens for it ignores universal laws of justice that apply to all prisoners of war, and a provocation to the Muslim world. Surely, the Americans would hate their prisoners to be treated in the same way as they are in Guantanamo! The book reprimands the Bush Administration for all such contempt for human dignity and fundamental rights and underscores the ramification of the corruption of absolute power that ignores national and international law. |
SINCE the Magna Carta in
1215, the world has followed the fundamental principle of judicial
process that is made available to any human being kept in confinement.
The recent underpinnings of the outrageous "neo-militarism" of
the American foreign policy and its fallout in the unilateral abrogation
of fundamental law in the Guantanamo Bay or the prison at Abu Gharib is
an unambiguous antithesis of The Universal Declaration of Human Rights
or the ideals of the American Constitution. The blatant atrocities here
are in direct infringement of American and International Law, a
conspicuous shift to the medieval system of executive fiat.