[Pnews] At Guantánamo Bay, the "guilty" go free, the innocent remain

[Prisoner News]

  At Guantánamo Bay, the guilty go free, the innocent remain

Taliban-Bergdahl swap highlights wretched plight of Gitmo detainees 
cleared for release who remain imprisoned

June 3, 2014 5:00AM ET
by Clive Stafford Smith 
<http://america.aljazeera.com/profiles/s/clive-stafford-smith.html> 
@CliveSSmith <http://www.twitter.com/CliveSSmith>
*http://america.aljazeera.com/opinions/2014/6/guantanamo-detaineestalibanbergdahlswap.html*

Controversy has arisen over the U.S. government deal that released five 
Taliban prisoners held for years in Guantánamo Bay in exchange for Sgt. 
Bowe Bergdahl, an American soldier captured and held in Afghanistan 
since June 2009. Critics have called the decision hypocritical.

There is a case that can be made for the allegation. The five Taliban 
were arguably among those who had actually committed crimes, if fighting 
foreign troops who invaded their country could be deemed an offense. At 
the very least, they had taken part in hostilities and might, 
originally, have been legitimately detained as bona/ /fide prisoners of 
war --- a position that would be more defensible if only the U.S. 
respected the Geneva Conventions.

Compare those five men to the 78 detainees remaining in Guantánamo Bay 
who have been held there for 12 years or more and yet have been cleared 
for release for half that time. With the Taliban five headed for 
freedom, the cleared prisoners now make up more than 52 percent of the 
149 detainees left there. Has there ever existed another prison where 
more than half the prisoners were told they had been cleared to leave 
but they could not go?

So, yes, it is certainly ironic that those who were purportedly guilty 
should be liberated while the patently innocent should remain.

Rep. Mike Rogers, the Republican chairman of the House Intelligence 
Committee, used a stronger word than hypocrisy. He effectively labeled 
<http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jun/01/republicans-bergdahl-release-deal-encourages-terrorists> 
members of Barack Obama's administration criminals: "I think they 
violated the law in two different places." Rogers and other Republicans 
think Obama's unwise action has made America a more dangerous place.

The question must be asked, though: Who is the fool, and who is the 
hypocrite?

The fool was the one who opened Guantánamo. A CIA agent said --- 10 
years ago now --- that for every detainee held without trial in this 
notorious base, we had provoked 10 others to wish America harm. If asked 
today, he would probably revise his estimate up a hundredfold. Although 
the day after 9/11, the U.S. had the sympathy of the world, the 
experiments of the George W. Bush administration with rendition, 
torture, Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo Bay drained all that goodwill away. 
Such policies have made the world a far more fractured and hate-filled 
place.

And who is the hypocrite? Under Bush, several hundred detainees were 
sent home. Among these, a number had pleaded guilty to war crimes, 
albeit in the discredited Guantánamo Military Commission. After Salim 
Hamdan pleaded guilty to being Osama bin Laden's driver, he was 
repatriated to Yemen. The majority of the innocent prisoners who remain 
are Yemeni, because the Republicans later designated the country as too 
dangerous to repatriate them to. Ibrahim al-Qosi pleaded guilty to being 
bin Laden's cook; the Republican president sent him home to Sudan, a 
country that the U.S. insisted was being run by an international war 
criminal who had committed genocide in Darfur.

My Guantánamo client, the British resident Shaker Aamer, laughingly 
suggested that he and the scores of other cleared prisoners should plead 
guilty to being some random employee of bin Laden's (his butcher, his 
baker, his candlestick maker), since that appeared to be the only way 
they could escape detention without charge or trial.

So if the Republicans believe that Obama is a hypocrite or a criminal, 
what do they think of his predecessor in office?

In truth, Obama did the right thing. For America, the war in Afghanistan 
is over. Not only was he entitled to set the five Taliban free, but he 
was also legally obliged to do so --- just as, thankfully, the Taliban 
released Bergdahl, whether they recognized the law as compelling their 
actions or not. It is not compliance with the law that provokes hatred 
but the hypocritical pretense that one's side is the sole purveyor of 
justice and the rule of law. It was also Obama's duty to Bergdahl to get 
him home after several years of misery that may presumably be compared 
to the ugly plight of detainees in Guantánamo.

Obama is committed to reversing the mistake that gave us Guantánamo in 
the first place. Of course, he has been much too slow to fulfill his 
2009 promise, but from my experience with the prison, I can attest that 
his staff is now working hard toward that goal --- albeit in the face of 
hypocritical and unwise obstruction by congressional Republicans.

/Editor's note: A previous version of this article mistakenly claimed 
that Australian detainee David Hicks pled guilty to a terrorism charge. 
Hicks entered an Alford plea, by which he admitted no guilt for what he 
was alleged to have done./

Clive Stafford Smith is the founder and director of Reprieve 
<http://www.reprieve.org/>.

-- 
Freedom Archives 522 Valencia Street San Francisco, CA 94110 415 
863.9977 www.freedomarchives.org
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://freedomarchives.org/pipermail/ppnews_freedomarchives.org/attachments/20140603/3bc2d487/attachment.htm>