Five New Reasons (and One Old One) Why We Must Close Guantanamo Now

By Liliana Segura, AlterNet. Posted June 6, 2009.

That's right, lawful exclusion.

Nevertheless, whatever the Obama administration calls it, the Uighurs -- who, according to McClatchy, get weekly phone calls, fast food and soon, laptops -- certainly seem to think they are being unlawfully imprisoned. This week, the Miami Herald reported that a group of Uighur prisoners "staged a self-styled protest inside their prison camp Monday, waving signs demanding their freedom written in crayon on their Pentagon-issued art supplies."

''We are the Uighurs,'' said one sign. "We are being oppressed in prison though we had been announced innocent.'"

Another: "We need to freedom."

The "polite protest," the Herald reported, lasted "for about five minutes for visiting reporters before guards hustled the journalists away."

''As you can see, they are pretty much free men,'' a Navy chief told reporters, with no sense of irony.

Reason #4: U.S. Federal Courts -- and U.S. Prisons -- Are Perfectly Equipped to Handle Terrorism Suspects

So what about those prisoners who aren't innocent? Surely of the 239 "detainees" still held at Guantánamo at least some need to be kept locked up, right?

Sure. And like terrorism suspects that came before them, these men should be tried in a court of law -- a real, legitimate court of law, not the kangaroo courts cobbled together by then-Vice President Dick Cheney and his chief of staff David Addington in the weeks after Sept. 11.

As many have been pointing out for months, U.S. courts have put plenty of terrorism suspects on trial in recent years. "Supermax Prisons in U.S. Already Hold Terrorists," the Washington Post reported last month (a headline that might be read less as news than a sorely needed reminder).

Detained in the Supermax facility in Colorado are Ramzi Yousef, who headed the group that carried out the first bombing of the World Trade Center in February 1993; Zacarias Moussaoui, convicted of conspiring in the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001; Ahmed Ressam, of the Dec. 31, 1999, Los Angeles airport millennium attack plots; Ahmed Omar Abu Ali, conspirator in several plots, including one to assassinate President George W. Bush; and Wadih el-Hage, convicted of the 1998 bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Kenya.

... "We have a vast amount of experience in how to judge the continued incarceration of highly dangerous prisoners, since we do this with thousands of prisoners every month, all over the United States, including some really quite dangerous people," Philip D. Zelikow, who was counselor to Bush administration Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and executive director of the 9/11 Commission, told the Senate Judiciary Committee last week.

Yet Democrats and Republicans alike are tripping over each other to insist that the "terrorists" housed at Guantánamo Bay are of another breed of monster altogether and can only be handled outside the country, in secret. This argument has advanced, not just the need to come up with a new, improved version of the military commissions -- dubbed "con-missions" by former prisoner Binyam Mohamed -- but the need for indefinite detention as well. Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., told MSNBC correspondent Andrea Mitchell that "if somebody is judged to be an unlawful combatant, and they remain a threat to our national security, what needs to be evolved is a process whereby their detention is periodically reviewed, either by a court, which I would prefer, or by a military panel, and a determination made as to whether the threat still continues."

"Now this would happen, I would think, annually, in a lengthy detention, but there is no question in my mind that somebody who is classified as an unlawful combatant can, in fact, be kept in detention until the end of this conflict, which means terrorism, against the United States, against her allies, and in the world abates."

(Apparently, Feinstein never got Obama's memo that there are no more "enemy combatants.")

The Democrats' -- and Obama's -- embrace of indefinite detention is disturbing. Keeping prisoners imprisoned without trial indefinitely is no more just under this president than it was under Bush. It is a disturbing testament to political double standards that the military commissions process and the notion of indefinite detention that were so abhorrent to so many under Bush are now going largely unquestioned when they become the policies of the Obama administration.

See more stories tagged with: torture, guantanamo, barack obama, jeremy scahill, andy worthington, michael ratner, ahmed ghappour, lakhdar boumediene, force-feeding, muhammad ahmad abdallah s

Liliana Segura is an AlterNet staff writer.

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