The Daily Background

Associated Press, in an article called “Administration: Detainees have no rights“:

The Bush administration said Monday that Guantanamo Bay prisoners have no right to challenge their detentions in civilian courts and that lawsuits by hundreds of detainees should be dismissed.

In court documents filed with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, the Justice Department defended the military’s authority to arrest people overseas and detain them indefinitely without access to courts.

[…]
Human rights groups and attorneys for the detainees say the law is unconstitutional. Prisoners normally have the right to challenge their imprisonment.

This is, of course, entirely unconstitutional. And not only that, but contrary to international law that the United States has signed and is a party to, as well as a violation of the local domestic laws in the various countries in which the Administration’s secret CIA prisons are located in.

The US Constitution guarantees the right to Habeas Corpus (the right to challenge the legality and merit of one’s detainment) to all people, regardless of race, gender, or citizenship. Various treaties to which the US is a party to guarantee that all human beings will be allowed to be treated the same as every other human being under the law. The Bush Administration is arguing that because a group of people it is holding is somehow “special” that they shouldn’t be given the same right to due process or other rights as normal human beings would be given.

Finally, it has been reported that the three (believed to be three, at least) European countries in which the CIA prisons are located in, are democracies and that this secret detention is entirely illegal and contrary to their domestic laws as well.

The right to challenge your detention (essentially the basic right to say that you’re innocent and have been wrongly arrested) is a fundamentally important one. There was a time when the Pentagon itself estimated that roughly 50% of the detainees it was imprisoning at Guantanamo were likely innocent of all crimes and had merely been scooped up because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time.

For a specific example, you need look no further than German-born Khalid El-Masri, who was kidnapped by CIA operatives, who took him to one of their secret prisons in Europe. They held him for months, beat and tortured him, all because he spelled his name similar to that of a suspected terrorist. He maintained his innocence all along, but since he was given no opportunity to speak to anybody other than the people who were abusing him, he had no right to properly challenge his detention (in other words, no ability to exercise his right to habeas corpus).

Finally, a higher-up looked into his situation and realized that he was, in fact, a normal law-abiding citizen who had been wrongly abducted. They let him go, blindfolded in the middle of a forrest at night. No apologies, no compensation, they just dumped him out the back of a truck and drove away. Habeas corpus is a crucial right that our Constitution promises for everyone. The Bush Administration should not be allowed to simply throw it out the window because they think they are saving the world.

Filed under: Human Rights, Z-TDB Blog