As
printed in
The Charlotte Observer
February 3,
2008
Guantanamo
was a mistake
From
George Daly, a Charlotte lawyer who represents prisoners at the
Guantanamo Bay Naval Base in Cuba:
Six years ago the first enemy combatants in the War on Terror
arrived at Guantanamo. During those six years we have discovered
that a few of the Guantanamo prisoners are violent and dangerous
al-Qaida terrorists, but most of them are innocent civilians who
were either swept up in the fog of war when we invaded Afghanistan,
or low-level Taliban who had been forcibly conscripted.
Fewer than 10 percent of Guantanamo prisoners were captured by
U.S. forces. Many of the others were turned over to the CIA to
collect the $5,000 bounties that were being paid for al-Qaida
and Taliban suspects. In Afghanistan and Pakistan, $5,000 is several
years' wages.
We need to be holding some of the prisoners at Guantanamo, but
not many. Our government has plans to try only about 10 percent
of them, and our six years of imprisoning the rest of them without
giving them a fair trial has turned into a nightmare.
Only about a third of all the prisoners held at Guantanamo since
2002 remain. The rest have been quietly released after years of
being tortured and deprived of sleep and held without trials in
solitary cells and driven slowly insane. One of my clients tried
to starve himself to death rather than remain at Guantanamo. Another
suffers from serious mental illness.
There is no evidence that having kept them in the belly of the
Guantanamo whale has made us any safer, but keeping them there
has made enemies for us around the world. Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib
prison and the Iraq war are the best recruiting tools Osama bin
Laden could have ever wished for. And because we declared a "war"
on terror and sent our troops into Iraq, we are a trillion dollars
poorer and the world sees us as an imperial bully.
How did we create such a monster?
Terrorism existed long before 9-11. The Oklahoma City bomber Timothy
McVeigh and the network of right-wing militias come to mind, as
do the 1993 bombers of the World Trade Center. No "war"
was declared on these terrorists. They were prosecuted under our
criminal laws.
But after 9-11, terrorism was made into a military problem, a
war problem, a problem that was beyond the law, rather than a
criminal problem to be solved through existing legal channels.
Shortly after Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld left office he
remarked that he thought it had been a mistake to have a "war"
on terror because the real situation was not a war but a "conflict
... against a relatively small number of terribly dangerous and
violent extremists."
It has been a costly error. We could have saved a trillion dollars
and now be living in a safer world if he had realized this in
2001 and convinced George Bush of it.
The correct way, the sane way, the genuinely American way to deal
with "a relatively small number of dangerous and violent
extremists" is to prosecute them in court. Our courts convicted
McVeigh and the World Trade Center bombers. Our FBI knows how
to get confessions without using torture. The world admires our
legal system. Going back to open and public trials for suspected
terrorists will start us back on the road to reclaiming the respect
of the world.
Next
time let's elect a president who believes in the American legal
system.
Copyright © 2007, The Charlotte Observer
