Center for International Policy

The Center for International Policy

cordially invites you to

A Conference to Call on Congress to
Close the Prison at Guantanamo
and
Repeal the Military Commissions Act

January 25, 2007
9:00 a.m. until 12 noon
In the Stein Room
Of the Brookings Institution
1775 Massachusetts Ave, NW
Washington, D.C.

Refreshment will be served

Please RSVP to Jennifer Schuett at the Center for International Policy

(202) 232-3317 or cubaintern@ciponline.org

A National Disgrace

Since the first detainees arrived at the Guantanamo Bay prison more than five years ago, some 775 have been held there. And yet, despite Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld’s early statement to the effect that these were among “the most dangerous, best trained, vicious killers on the fact of the Earth,” not a single detainee has been convicted of any crime. Only ten have even been charged. With little fanfare, some 360 detainees have been returned to their home countries, where most were found innocent and set free. How does this square with Rumsfeld’s statement?

The majority of the detainees were arrested by Pakistani forces or the Afghan Northern Alliance and turned over to U.S. forces. Many were sold to U.S. forces to even personal scores, or just for the money. Most were guilty of nothing. But guilty or not, they have been held year after year under deplorable conditions, not having any idea as to why they are there or what the charges are (if any) against them. And many have been terribly abused. By now, the documented cases of torture and systematic violations of the Geneva Conventions are beyond refutation. No wonder that many detainees have tried to commit suicide. So far, three have succeeded.

Meanwhile, to end-run the Supreme Court’s decision that the procedures against a handful of Guantanamo detainees were unconstitutional, President Bush managed this past October to have a Military Commissions Act passed in the Congress. This denies habeas corpus, denies the presumption of innocence, denies the right to trial within a reasonable period of time, denies the right to a lawyer of choice, and denies the right to challenge and present evidence. It, in effect, simply rubber-stamps the administration’s so-called legal procedures at Guantanamo. The Military Commissions Act, in sum, contradicts the American system of justice. Congress should repeal it as soon as possible.

Finally, maintaining a prison at Guantanamo Bay is a blatant violation of the 1903 treaty with Cuba. Article II of that treaty gives the U.S. “the right to use and occupy the waters adjacent to said areas of land and water…for use as coaling and naval stations only, and for no other purpose.” It gives us no right whatever to maintain a prison there. This is another compelling reason to close the prison as soon as possible. Congress should simply stop providing funds to maintain it.

The principal reason to close it, however, is because the word “Guantanamo” has become a stain on our national honor! As for the remaining detainees at Guantanamo, they should either be charged and tried in a proper court of law, or they should be released – possibly by returning them to their home countries.

Agenda

9:00 – 9:30 a.m. – Registration and coffee

9:30--10:45 a.m. – First presentations

Chair -Wayne S. Smith, Senior Fellow, Center for International Policy

Colonel (Retired) Ann Wright (just back from demonstrating at the gate of the Guantanamo Naval Base, demanding that the prison there be closed) – Absence of evidence that most detainees are guilty of anything other than being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Christopher Anders, Senior Legislative Counsel, American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) – Deplorable conditions under which the detainees are held, including physical and mental abuses and documented violations of the Geneva Conventions.

Discussion

10:45 – noon – Second Presentations

Chair – Wayne S. Smith

Carolyn Patty Blum, consultant to Center for Constitutional Rights, Guantanamo Global Justice Project – Why the Military Commissions Act must be repealed.

Wayne S. Smith, Center for International Policy – How maintaining a prison at Guantanamo violates our Treaty of 1903 and therefore is in violation of international law. In effect, we now have no legal right to be there.

Discussion

We will have a petition available calling on Congress to cut off funding for the prison at Guantanamo and to repeal the Military Commissions Act. Anyone who wishes can sign on!

Participants

Christopher Anders has been legislative counsel to the American Civil Liberties Union for nearly ten years. He has represented the ACLU before Congress and the Executive Branch on a range of civil liberties and civil rights issues, including the government's torture and detention practices. He lobbied Congress on torture and detention legislation, including the Military Commissions Act, the Detainee Treatment Act, extraordinary rendition, the need for an outside special counsel for torture investigations and prosecutions, the closure of Guantanamo Bay detention facilities and defunding new courtroom facilities, and nominations of key torture officials for positions at the Justice Department and Defense Department. Anders has testified before several congressional committees and has been interviewed frequently by national television news and newspapers. He also works closely with litigators in the ACLU Human Rights Program, who have brought many of the leading legal challenges to the government's torture and rendition practices.

Carolyn Patty Blum is a consultant to the Center for Constitutional Rights, Guantanamo Global Justice Initiative. She also is an Adjunct Professor of Law at Columbia University Law School where she teaches Refugee Law. Professor Blum is a Visiting Fellow at Kellogg College, Oxford University where she is a Tutor in the Masters of Studies Program in International Human Rights Law. Professor Blum, a Clinical Professor of Law (Emeritus) at the University of California, Berkeley, taught at Berkeley’s Boalt Hall Law School for over twenty years. She teaches in the fields of immigration and refugee law and international human rights law. For the past eight years, she has been working on a series of law suits to establish legal culpability for the state terror that gripped El Salvador in the 1980s under the Alien Tort Claims Act and Torture Victim Protection Act. Professor Blum has written extensively on refugee law and human rights as well as on film and the law. In addition, Professor Blum has assisted in the litigation of dozens of major asylum and human rights cases in the United States.

Wayne S. Smith, a Marine veteran of the Korean War, is now a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy in Washington, D.C., and an adjunct professor at the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, where he directs the Cuba Exchange Program. Smith is the former chief of the U.S. Interests Section in Havana (1979-82). At the time he left the Foreign Service in 1982, because of his disagreements with policy, he was considered the State Department’s leading expert on Cuba. He is the author of The Closest of Enemies: A Personal and Diplomatic Account of the Castro Years, and has edited and written various other books.

Ann Wright served 29 years in the US Army/Army Reserve and retired as a Colonel. She spent 16 years as a US diplomat assigned to US Embassies in Nicaragua, Grenada, Somalia, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Sierra Leone, Micronesia and Mongolia. She was on the team that reopened the US Embassy in Kabul, Afghanistan in December, 2001. She resigned from the diplomatic corps in March, 2003 in opposition to the Iraq war. Ms. Wright is a writer and speaker and was a member of the international delegation that went to Cuba for the January 11, 2007 international call to close the prison at the US Naval Base, Guantanamo, Cuba.