The infamous extra-legal U.S. detention facility in Cuba has made the US government globally tantamount with the revocation of international law, and the torture and abuse of prisoners or, as the Bush administration prefers to call them, ‘enemy combatants.’
The situation violates both the letter and the spirit of US traditions of justice, fairness and decency. Legally, Guantanamo is a black hole in the war on terror. Morally, it’s a black eye for America.
Keeping innocent people detained doesn’t guarantee our safety however, it lessens our security but the real problem - the conundrum wrapped in an enigma - comes with the detainees after they are released, with a sword hanging over their head, to reunite their families with a fear of facing torture in home country.
One of the examples is Jamil el-Banna who was detained by the US in 2002 after Britain sent the CIA false information about him. He had also failed to accept an MI5 offer to turn informant. If refused entry to Britain, Mr Banna could be returned to face torture in his native Jordan, from where he fled to Britain in 1994 after alleging ill treatment.
The Bush administration is already releasing the wrongly detained. It has been quietly carving away at its mistakes, sending home 385 detainees who look no more or less guilty than those remaining in custody.
What is US going to do with individuals against whom US doesn’t even have sufficient evidence to try? It is hard to guess what goes behind those barbed wires in Gitmo however; it is hard for US to escape the trap that it set for itself by not sending home those who had been seized by mistake. But it is time to return to a system in which terrorists are tried in courts based on actual evidence. Unless this belief is accepted, Guantanamo won’t be closed because there will always be some prisoners who can’t be tried and will never be freed.
