The New York Times has just published a one-of-a-kind op-ed from Samir Naji al Hasan Moqbel, a prisoner at Guantánamo. It details the brutal and inhumane conditions of the prison, the mistreatment of the prisoners, and names the Obama administration as complicit in a policy of indefinite detention without charges or trial. It’s this policy that has kept prisoners at Gitmo for upwards of 11 years, even though many of them have been cleared for release. It is this policy that has incited a hunger strike protest that’s been going on since February. It is this policy that has caused some prisoners to commit suicide.
It seems obvious that there are human rights violations going on here, and that Congress has ignored them, and that Obama has tacitly given his approval. But I can’t figure out why. Why don’t we charge the prisoners with something? Why don’t we put them on trial? Why do spend money to keep the prison open? For the prisoners that have been cleared for release – why don’t we send them home?
Presidents, regardless of whether their name is followed by an R or a D, find it convenient to have a place where they can keep certain people without having to bother with a trial. It’s flagrantly unconstitutional and a human rights abuse, but the last two Presidents have cared very little about things like that.
Best solution would be to hang them all. It’d save lives since, quite unsurprisingly, a large number of previously released gitmos have turned to terrorism killing many innocent people. But more important, it’d stop the incessant liberal whining.
Not that I think the conditions at Gitmo are ok (in fact, I find them deplorable), but if we want to at least alleviate them by releasing everyone cleared for release, there’s a question we need to answer:
Where?
As in, most of these poor guys don’t have a country that would accept them. Congress isn’t going to let Obama release them in Miami (or any other US city). Their country of origin doesn’t want them back. All the other countries in the world aren’t going to grant them a visa. Setting them adrift at sea seems counterproductive.
The other question is: How much?
Congress isn’t allocating the money to move these prisoners, (mis) using their power of the purse strings. The aforementioned other countries don’t want them, much less pay for them to come over. The prisoners themselves can’t really afford a plane ticket (even if they could get on a plane).
The “held without trial” status is awful. Sadly, the only way we’re going to resolve it is with a different congress and with a Secretary of State that can convince another nation to take them in.
I think it’s more complicated that that. From memory, there was a moratorium placed on the release of a bunch of folks still in custody from Yemen pending a new evaluation. I don’t recall why, exactly, it was put in place, but I have to believe that Obama didn’t just arbitrarily do it for the fun of it. After all, a bunch of prisoners HAVE been released from Gitmo, both under Bush and under Obama, so they aren’t holding the guys left just for the fun of it, or because Presidents just love violating human rights…this is going to be a pretty big political hit for Obama, so he’s not going to do something like this for no reason.
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The New York Times has just published a one-of-a-kind op-ed from Samir Naji al Hasan Moqbel, a prisoner at Guantánamo. It details the brutal and inhumane conditions of the prison, the mistreatment of the prisoners, and names the Obama administration as complicit in a policy of indefinite detention without charges or trial. It’s this policy that has kept prisoners at Gitmo for upwards of 11 years, even though many of them have been cleared for release. It is this policy that has incited a hunger strike protest that’s been going on since February. It is this policy that has caused some prisoners to commit suicide.
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I read the article, but, frankly, it’s hard to say how much of it is this guy whining and how much of it is true. If he’s to be believed, he was just looking for work in Afghanistan when the war started and he fled to Pakistan where he was picked up and handed over to the US and eventually made his way to Gitmo. However, his story seems pretty far fetched to me, and clearly he’s playing for sympathy (’ Last month, on March 15, I was sick in the prison hospital and refused to be fed. A team from the E.R.F. (Extreme Reaction Force), a squad of eight military police officers in riot gear, burst in. They tied my hands and feet to the bed. They forcibly inserted an IV into my hand. I spent 26 hours in this state, tied to the bed. During this time I was not permitted to go to the toilet. They inserted a catheter, which was painful, degrading and unnecessary. I was not even permitted to pray.
I will never forget the first time they passed the feeding tube up my nose. I can’t describe how painful it is to be force-fed this way. As it was thrust in, it made me feel like throwing up. I wanted to vomit, but I couldn’t. There was agony in my chest, throat and stomach. I had never experienced such pain before. I would not wish this cruel punishment upon anyone.')
It doesn’t seem obvious to me that human rights are being violated, but if you assume SAMIR NAJI al HASAN MOQBEL is telling the absolute and unvarnished truth it’s a Kafkaesque situation for him. Thing is, we don’t know all of the facts, so we only have this guy and his lawyers word for it.
I don’t know why we don’t try them, except that when military tribunals were discussed they seemed unpopular. Don’t know why anyone who was cleared for release has been held back either.
“Convenient” is a good word for it – hopefully the hunger strikes will make it less so.
After looking into it a bit further, these are not the first hunger strikes to occur at Gitmo – they also occurred during the Bush years, to little effect. It’s also not the first op-ed in the NYT written by a prisoner there, but again, the others had little effect. I started this thread because it seemed things were coming to a head at the prison, but maybe it’s just a repeat of Bush era events.
OK, so in order to hang them, it would seem we would need to charge them with some crime that merits the death penalty, try them, find them guilty, and then carry out the sentence. Yes?
If we can’t find some crime or another to charge them with, then it seems to me that we shouldn’t summarily execute them. Yes?
Another tack would be that, hey, we don’t have a list of specific crimes that these guys committed. But they’re Taliban soldiers, fighting for the Taliban, so we don’t need to charge them with crimes to hold them prisoner. You don’t need to charge prisoners of war with any sort of crime to hold them. The problem is that means we treat the prisoners as POWs. Of course it is possible to hold someone as a POW, investigate whether they also committed crimes, and try them for the actual crimes they did commit. POW status doesn’t give you immunity for all acts committed as a soldier. But if you are a POW, “shooting at American soldiers” isn’t a crime you can be charged with.
Or, if “shooting at American soldiers” is a crime that you can be charged with, then hold the trial, convict those who committed the crime and let go those who are acquitted. If there isn’t enough evidence after 10 years of detention to convict some Pashtun goatherd of shooting at American soldiers and being in the Taliban, well, maybe we should have tried them sooner.
As far as the Yemeni prisoners go, they seem welcome back in Yemen. Cite. The president has even criticized Obama:
As for the money question, it seems to me like it would be cheaper to fly a cleared prisoner home than to pay for his room and board for another two/five/ten years.
I think the prisoners at Gitmo should either be charged and tried or released, but I do have to say that the President of Yemen lecturing us on human rights is hilarious.
Or we could stuff their corpses in vats of alcohol and call it the Conservation Solution.
That’s a lot juridical angst. Remember: the first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers. After that dealing with Gitmo will be a breeze. In any case, as a hypothetical exercise I wonder how much responsibility those advocating the release of gitmos are willing to assume for the actions of those released? The only Danish released immate went on Jihad in Syria btw. Fortunately he was killed. But I wonder how many he managed to murder before that.
I think it’s terrible that Guantanamo is still open, and I strongly think that anyone who is truly dangerous there ought to answer for their crimes in the United States justice system. (I also recognize that that’s not very likely.)
But when I read the article, my first thought was: who the fuck leaves Yemen for Taliban-controlled Afghanistan to look for good-paying jobs? Seriously, was KBR hiring back then?
I have never understood what the US was supposed to do, legally, with these detainees.
What alternative is there? I ask this genuinely. We in the US are told that they appear to be stateless international criminals. What supports the ideals of justice better than trying them for their crimes, if only to determine if they are, in fact, guilty? If not, then there may be a problem.
While that is true, the money has to be allocated for that, and that’s Congress’ job. It’s not that the US doesn’t have the money, it’s that Congress won’t let the President spend it on relocating the detainees.
Not that Congress is good about doing things that would save money and respect human rights, but there you go.
I read the op ed - what are the “brutal and inhumane conditions” the OP mentions? I saw some talk about force-feeding people who were on hunger strikes, but that doesn’t sound particularly inhumane.
They force him to have an IV as well, and it hurt apparently. Plus the feeding tube was the worst pain this guy every had, according to the article. He wanted to throw up but couldn’t, and when he got urp on his clothes they wouldn’t let him change.
I think the basic inhumanity here, from the perspective of most posters, is that he’s been held for over a decade with no end in sight. Since I don’t know the details of WHY he’s been held that long, but since I assume it’s not just on a whim, I’m less sure about that. I don’t know why these guys haven’t been tried, but my WAG is that it’s either national security issues, or there is some other underlying issue (maybe about jurisdiction or something along those lines, since we couldn’t try them using a military court).
Either try 'em as criminals, or hold 'em as prisoners of war. This absurd nebulous neither-nor is, if not Kafkaesque, Carrollian!
My opinion has been that the “War on Terror” should have been dealt with as a criminal investigation, all along. Calling it a “war” leads to this kind of nonsense. Who is the enemy? No flag, no nation, no unit, no command? Makes 'em common criminals, and the law covers that quite well.
(I can even dig going to war against Afghanistan, because they refused to cooperate in criminal investigations regarding the 9-11 terrorists. Harboring criminals is a legit casus belli.)
There’s no reason to think it’s anything better. We threw people in there because somebody used us to get rid of a personal enemy by telling us he was a terrorist, or because we tortured their name out of someone, or because someone sold them to us as a “terrorist” for a no questions asked bounty.
Either there’s no evidence, or any evidence is hopelessly tainted by torture. There’s no trials because if we tried them, we’d have to let them go.