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Last night I was at a Human Rights Watch dinner in Chicago. We were there to meet two activists, one from Burma and one from Uzbekistan, who were recipients of awards for their work in conjunction with HRW. But a portion of the evening’s program focused on what to do about Guantanamo Bay Detention Center.
It’s easy to be in favor of closing down Gitmo. Even the President-Elect thinks it’s high time that place disappeared. But the question remains: What to do with all those prisoners?
Some will be shipped back to their home country. Some will be released into the United States because there is little or no evidence of any wrongdoing on their part, but a large number are in limbo. They can’t go home and they are potentially guilty of crimes that preclude their release into the United States.
Noises in government have indicated that national security concerns will encourage a plan that includes secret trials, new processes for determining guilt or innocence that don’t involve the public.
There has also been talk of moving those convicted Gitmo prisoners into a new facility on American soil.
Now, concerns about national security are hard to argue with. They don’t tell us what needs to be secured so we can’t assess whether the sacrifice of legal protections are worth it. Those in the know say that the general protections of Federal courts are insufficient. I’m not in the know, so what can I say in return?
Still, I encourage all of us, as the Gitmo plans move forward, to demand that Federal court become the forum for any trials resulting from the facility’s closing. If national security is a concern, require that the government prove to the electorate why Federal safeguards are insufficient.
It’s not because we know that the court is necessarily the right place for highly classified information, but if the national security excuse is never challenged it will continue to be a catch-all phrase that permits a constant erosion of civil rights.
Well in the years I spent living in Gtmo I can say it was quiet, comfortable, and great until the prison came around. The base, itself, still serves a vital purpose but everyone who lived there knows it was just an excuse for them to experiment with methods of torture on muslims without questioning the legality of it or fearing any legal recourse. More importantly, though, it existed to fatten up Dick Chenney’s pocket book, since only contractors he had invested in were used to construct the 30 million dollar prison. Granted living there and being gay with my internet and phone calls to my boyfriend constantly being monitored and “friends” approaching me wondering if the things they’d been hearing/reading while spying on me were true and cause for any form of alarm. Meh. At least they called and offered their condolences when they said they listened in on my grandmother calling to tell me my grandfather had died. Yeah… that’s pretty much the only perk I got out of living there. That and a lot of time focusing on finishing my Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees.
National Security has been used as the catch-all phrase eroding our civil rights and shifting the balance of our three branch system of Government in favor of the Executive Branch. Just on that basis alone we need to push back in favor of the equal balance of power between our three branches of government intended by our founding fathers.
From where I sit, that is all we need to know. Demand Federal Court trials and make the government prove secrecy is vital….no more free passes using the National Security Card.