The Daily Background
| Administration plans to spent $125 million on war crimes trial facility in Guantanamo
by Arlen Parsa
The Associated Press reported today that the US military plans to spend 125 million dollars worth of taxpayer’s money in order to build a gigantic new compound in Guantanamo to put detainees on trial for war crimes.
My question is: is anybody really fooled? Does anybody really think that this Administration is going to conduct fair trials for the detainees which they are illegally holding in Guantanamo and in secret prisons around the world?
In five years, they’ve only managed to find enough evidence to put 10 of the people they are holding in detention on trial. And this is out of hundreds of people that are in American custody as ‘enemy combatants.’ And even then, those were military trials, in which the government has what many consider an unfair advantage due to more lax requirements for government prosecutors, more stringent requirements for defense attorneys, and less rights allowed to the accused.
The UDHR dictates that “All are equal before the law and are entitled without any discrimination to equal protection of the law.” Obviously people that the Administration labels ‘enemy combatants’ are treated unequally under the law: they aren’t allowed the same rights that every other person would be allowed. The right to challenge one’s detention (habeas corpus, which is guaranteed for all people, regardless of race, gender or citizenship in the US Constitution), the right to trial by jury, even in some cases the right to competent legal representation.
