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Guantanamo: Some Seven Year Anniversary!

In Australia, recently released former Guantanamo inmate, David Hicks, has called for the dismantling of the place. His calls are being echoed around the world - as Gitmo enters its seventh anniversary - by law-abiding people concerned about justice, decency and humanity.

Salon has this piece, "Our Shameful Guantanamo Anniversary", reproduced on CommonDreams:

"Today, America’s Guantánamo era enters its seventh shameful year. If we are ever to regain our standing as a nation committed to the rule of law and fundamental human rights, we must close the detention facility at Guantánamo Bay now, reaffirm our commitment to international treaties and our own Constitution, and either release or prosecute fairly the men who have been held so long in a legal and moral black hole.

Six long years ago, the first orange-clad, shackled and blindfolded prisoners arrived at Guantánamo’s Camp X-Ray. The Bush administration’s plan was to fashion Guantánamo quite literally as an island outside the law — a place with no lawyers, no rights and, above all, no public scrutiny. The administration labeled the men imprisoned at Guantánamo “illegal enemy combatants” who were to be held until the “cessation of hostilities” in the “war on terror” — in other words, forever. Such “quaint” notions as the Geneva Conventions and the constitutional “Great Writ” of habeas corpus were swiftly discarded because the men at Guantánamo were uniformly, in former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s words, “among the most dangerous, best trained vicious killers on the face of the earth.” President Bush, somewhat more prosaically, assured the world that the Guantánamo prisoners were “bad people.”

Make no mistake: There were, and are, innocent people imprisoned at Guantánamo. Brig. Gen. Jay Hood, who was Guantánamo’s commander for several years, candidly acknowledged in the Wall Street Journal: “Sometimes, we just didn’t get the right folks.” And we now know that only a small percentage of the many hundreds of men and boys who have been held at Guantánamo were captured on a battlefield fighting against Americans; far more were sold into captivity by tribal warlords for substantial bounties."

Perhaps more interesting, is this piece in The Guardian by Moazzam Begg, a former Guantanamo Bay detainee and spokesman for Cageprisoners:

"On January 11 2008 the US prison camp at Guantánamo Bay enters the seventh year since the first men captured during the "war on terror" were brought there shackled, hooded, masked and ear-muffed.

Much has happened over the past few years that should have sufficed in bringing about the demise and closure of the world's most notorious prison: The 2004 US supreme court ruling in Rasul (2004) passed in favour of the right of detainees to apply for habeas corpus; the US supreme court ruling in Hamdan (2006) stating President Bush did not have the authority to set up military commissions because it violated the uniform code of military justice (UCMJ) and the Geneva conventions.

Also, last year, in the cases of Salim Hamdan (allegedly Osama bin Laden's driver) and Omar Khadr (a Canadian citizen detained since the age of 15), all charges were dismissed because they had only been classified as "enemy combatants" and not "unlawful enemy combatants". Despite all of these rulings by the highest court in the land both men - and about 275 others - remain in custody without charge or trial.

Just before the advent of 2008, Guantánamo's most well-known prisoner, David Hicks, was finally freed in his native Australia. In May 2007, Hicks entered a plea bargain and became the first prisoner to be convicted in Guantánamo. He was given a custodial sentence of only nine months - which he served out in his home town, Adelaide."

Read Beggs' full, worthwhile reading, piece here.

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