CAP: Postpone Gitmo Close, Send Leftovers to Bagram
The influential Center for American Progress, which has close ties to the Obama administration, is now calling on President Obama to push back the closing of
Jul 31, 202023.3K Shares1.3M Views
The influential Center for American Progress, which has close ties to the Obama administration, is now calling on President Obama to push back the closing of the Guantanamo Bay detention center to July. That’s despite the president’s day-two directiveto close the notorious prison by January. Closure has been impeded by the inability to send some Guantanamo detainees home and the delay in deciding what to do with those that might be guilty.
That’s just one of several sure-to-be-controversial recommendations the group makes in a new report released Tuesday.
CAP also wants the president to prosecute the suspected 9/11 conspirators in civilian federal courts, contrary to the calls of some lawmakers, like Senators Graham, Lieberman, McCain and others who insisted they be tried only in military commissions. (Their efforts to push through legislation to that effect failed last week.)
And, despite the fact that these five men are accused of the largest mass-murder ever on U.S. soil, CAP wants the president not to seek the death penalty for any of them. “It is in the strategic interests of the United States to deny these most heinous Al Qaeda terrorists what they want most: martyrdom,” writes Ken Gude, Associate Director of the International Rights and Responsibility Program and author of the new report.
As for the use of the military commissions that the president just revived by signing new legislation last week, those “remain tainted by Bush-era mistakes, and must be limited—if used at all—to battlefield crimes in order to gain a measure of legitimacy.”
Gude also recommends limiting military detention to actual enemy fighters captured in combat zones. Right now, the administration claims the rightto seize and detain indefinitely suspected al-Qaeda or Taliban terrorists found anywhere in the world.
Those concerned that the Bagram detention center in Afghanistan is becoming “Obama’s Gitmo,” as it’s increasingly called, may not appreciate Gude’s final recommendation. While Gude would imprison anyone convicted in U.S. criminal courts in U.S. prisons, as we usually do, he recommends transferring anyone now at Guantanamo who will remain in military custody — either to be tried by a military commission or simply to be detained indefinitely — to the U.S.-run prison at Bagram.
While that might sound logical, particularly given the strong political objections to transferring Guantanamo detainees to the United States, civil and human rights advocates are likely to point out that it would not only allow the Obama administration to continue — indefinitely — the troubling practice of indefinite detention, but would place those indefinitely detained even further beyond the reach of U.S. courts than they were at Guantanamo. After all, the Supreme Court ruled that Guantanamo detainees have the right to challenge their detention through a writ of habeas corpus in federal courts; most Bagram detainees, on the other hand, do nothave that right.
Advocates such as Human Rights First, which issued a new, highly critical reporton the detention and trials of detainees in Afghanistan this month, have complained that the military procedures there don’t afford prisoners a meaningful way to challenge their detention. The report, based on interviews conducted in April, found that prisoners were often not informed of the specific reasons for their detention, were not provided with lawyers to represent them, and were not allowed to bring witnesses to speak on their behalf or challenge the evidence presented against them.
New detention review procedures implemented in Septembercould solve some of those problems, although detainees still don’t get legal representation. In Gude’s view, while the administration “can and should do more,” Obama officials “are making good progress on procedures at Bagram.” Ultimately, he says, the U.S. detention system there has to be better connected to Afghan law.
Whether we ought to be placing our hopes for due process and rule of law in the Afghan legal system, which suffers from plenty of its own serious problems, is a whole other question.
Hajra Shannon
Reviewer
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