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The continued presence of detainees at the American naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba is a travesty of justice.
Jan. 11 marked the sixth anniversary of the first prison transfer to the detention center at the naval base. Since then, hundreds of men have been captured by U.S. forces across the Middle East and transferred to Guantanamo Bay. Not one of them has ever seen a trial. Thanks to popular pressure from human-rights groups and active citizens, hundreds have been released. However, not one of them was granted the right to a proper day in court. Some 275 prisoners remain, untried, unrepresented, and unable to see or communicate with their friends and families.
Take the case of Sami al-Hajj, a Sudanese journalist. In December 2001 he was captured in Pakistan and turned over to the American government. He has been detained at Guantanamo Bay for over five years without a trial. Aside from legal treatment that resembles some of the most repressive governments in the world, Sami al-Hajj has also reported a number of abuses committed by his captors. According to Amnesty International, his knee cap was shattered when guards stomped on his leg, he was beaten and insulted on the basis of his skin color, and denied medical treatment for his throat cancer, treatment prescribed for the rest of his life.
The facts speak for themselves. Alongside the more brutal treatment that Sami al-Hajj has been subjected to stand the more common procedures. Sleep deprivation, stress positions, extreme temperatures, humiliation, psychological abuse and mistreatment, and forced intravenous feeding, a practice considered tantamount to torture by human-rights groups. And then there is waterboarding.
From Dick Cheney's "dunk in the water" comment to the recent destruction of videotapes depicting CIA interrogation, our government has made it clear that it has resorted to waterboarding on a number of occasions. Waterboarding, a common interrogation technique, dates back centuries, when it was used in the Spanish inquisition, to more recent times, when it was practiced by regimes such as Nazi Germany (and now our government). It has been consistently treated as torture by American courts.
Contrary to popular media depiction, waterboarding is not simulated drowning. In waterboarding, one's lungs are slowly filled with water, which means that waterboarding is in fact drowning, just in a regulated form. The drowning is not simulated; rather, the interrogators stop the practice before the prisoner has completely suffocated. Needless to say, it is a particularly brutal technique, both physically and psychologically. The question is why has the American government resorted to this ancient torture?
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Jason Vick, it takes some courage to say all that and walk away. But do you have the courage to live with your policy choice? Write us an open letter to the 9/11 families, explaning why, if it were in your power, you would have rejected waterboarding and chosen to watch their loved ones die on TV. Don't run away to the high moral ground, say it, Jason Vick, say it.
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You have to measure legality and illegality by appropriate standards. There are a lot of things prohibited by US law which are not prohibited by international law, and vice versa. It is worth remembering here that the majority of those detained at Guantanamo Bay are not US citizens, and as such are not required to be afforded the same rights as those citizens. The Geneva conventions apply specifically to prisoners of war, but in order to be covered by those conventions it is assumed that both sides will play 'by the rules.' 'Freedom fighters' or 'insurgents,' however you prefer to refer to them, generally do not wear uniforms, do not wave their flags as they assault, do not generally take prisoners alive, and routinely hide amongst the population. Thus, they need not be afforded protections by the Geneva conventions. Courts don't write law, they simply enforce existing laws, so the Nuremburg court's jurisdiction is out as well. The ultimate point here is that playing by the rules puts our soldiers and ourselves at risk, because terrorists and insurgents don't play by the rules. That isn't to say that we ought to be able to practice wanton brutality, but the issue isn't quite so simple as the 'Bush lied, people died' mantra you seem to take as absolute truth here. For the record, protesting on the steps of the SCOTUS is simply ludicrous when you know that it is prohibited by law - only the ignorant would be impressed by people who all but ask to be arrested.
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