Mick Hartley

For those of us whose inclinations have generally been to support US action since 9/11, Guantanamo has always been a major problem. Here’s an excellent piece by Bronwen Maddox in the Times:

Every time there is a chance for the United States to escape from the trap it has created for itself in Guantanamo Bay, it slams the door shut.

The Pentagon’s decision this week to seek the death penalty for six men it accuses of the 9/11 attacks, and to try them under the hugely disputed version of military courts that it has devised, is one of the stupidest mistakes that the Bush Administration has made.

Everything about Guantanamo is an affront to the values the US says it is defending in the War on Terror. The principle of holding hundreds of people there without charge, for years; the fluid rules of the “military commissions” used for the very few who will be tried; the torture that the Administration acknowledges has been practised on these six: all these are an assault on the US Constitution.

To see the most powerful country in the world scrabbling on the edge of a nearby island, with whose leader it is not on speaking terms, for the sole purpose of evading its own laws and principles, is an embarrassment.

But the pity is that, in charging these six men, the US should have the world on its side. On September 11, 2001, it had the world’s appalled, instinctive sympathy. It could have retained that by trying the suspected architects of the assault in its established courts, under principles of justice that go back to its founders.

Instead, it has put itself in an indefensible position by subjecting its captives to new courts, under unclear rules. The Guantanamo trials, already the world’s slowest legal process, will implode under waves of justifiable legal challenge, and the world will regard the US, not the 9/11 suspects, as in the dock.