EDITORIALS
Close Guantanamo prison
Obama can take significant early step by seeking trials in America’s courts
Come Jan. 20, Barack Obama will swear to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.
One quick action he could take to show Americans just how serious he is about that promise — and to show the world just what a wonderful document that Constitution is — would be to fulfill his campaign promise to close the prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and to renounce the entire system of secretive justice that hides there.
With the possible exception of the horrors of Abu Ghraib, which have been ended, nothing has done more to undermine America’s claim for the moral high ground in the war against terror than the Bush administration’s unrelenting effort to dump terrorists, real and imagined, into a parallel universe where no system of law and no rules of evidence apply. There has been no more harmful example of the Bush- Cheney administration’s disdain for the principles of the very way of life we are supposedly fighting to protect.
While there is no serious dispute that some of the 250 inmates of Guantanamo are indeed the most vile and dangerous kinds of terrorists, there is also no longer any question that the facility has for many years also held people whose only crime was to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, ratted out by personal enemies or turned over to U. S. or Afghan forces for the bounty they commanded.
With nothing resembling the right of habeas corpus guaranteed by the Constitution to all within the reach of the American government, no access to counsel, not even the right to know what they are charged with doing and by whom, inmates at Guantanamo have been victim to a low level of unending torture that provides no argument that the United States is a nation that cherishes the rule of law.
Leaks from the Obama camp indicate that those advising the president-elect and those who may hold positions of trust in his administration are working out the details for the system that will follow the closing of Guantanamo’s detention center. It won’t be easy.
There will be difficulty handling cases where evidence was gathered by means that are legitimately secret or shamefully violent. The constitutional assurance that defendants see all evidence, and be able to cross-examine all witnesses, against them will be difficult to uphold in cases where so much depends on necessarily secretive intelligence-gathering.
But if the word comes down from the commander in chief of the United States that American justice will conform in every way to American standards, then it cannot be beyond the abilities of the departments of Justice and Defense to work the problems out.
They can start by consulting the handful of American military officers who have resigned rather than participate in the kangaroo courts of Guantanamo. They have shown that they know the post that American justice, in uniform or out, is supposed to stand.
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