What the World Should Know About Guantanamo

[donsu]

http://www.counterpunch.com/valentine09042004.html

The new book Guantanamo: What The World Should Know is an interview between author/editor Ellen Ray, and Michael Ratner, an eloquent human rights attorney and president of the Center for Constitutional Rights. Mr Ratner and his colleagues at the CCR have the distinction of being the first Americans to mount a legal challenge of the Kafkaesque detention and interrogation facilities the Bush Administration uses at the US military base in Guantanamo, Cuba, to incarcerate suspects in the war on terror.

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Having represented HIV-positive Haitian refugees detained at Guantanamo in the 1990s, Ratner also knows the history of what may rightfully be described as America's Devil's Island. Knowing the history helps to put the situation in context. As Ratner explains, even when he was representing the Haitians, the US government insisted that no court had jurisdiction over Guantanamo. "The United States wanted Guantanamo to be a law-free zone," he says.
Evidently, this has always been the case. But Guantanamo's special legal status, forged in the ambiguous language of the 1903 Platt Amendment to the Cuban Constitution, is especially well crafted to serve the US government's duplicitous motives in the murky war on terror. Guantanamo is a place where the US government is totally unaccountable, although the US military is in total control. Suspected members of al Qaeda, captured in Afghanistan and Pakistan, may have some legal recourse in those countries. But once they land in Guantanamo, they disappear down a legal black hole; which is why some people facetiously refer to it as "an off-shore concentration camp."

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The purpose of Camp X-Ray, like all of Guantanamo's detention facilities, is the slow, calculated murder of the spirit. It's a place where people are subjected to unbearable, humiliating and degrading forms of abuse every minute of every day. They sleep on concrete floors, and are denied clothing, medical attention and food. Unless, of course, they cooperate.
As Major General Geoffrey Miller, the camp commandant, once boasted, many detainees have cooperated during the climatic hours they spend in Guantanamo's interrogation booths, which Ratner describes as "trailers, really."

Guantanamo is also a laboratory, where new methods of destroying the human spirit are constantly being tried. Thus, sometime in the middle of 2002, a number of prisoners were transferred from Camp X-Ray to Camp Delta, which is different in so far as it separates detainees according to their status. Those who cooperate are segregated from those who do not, and those who are deemed to be troublemakers get special attention in their own private quarters.
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shame on us

shame on us all because we have not closed this hellhole and imprisoned the commanders and traitor lawyers.

[ayeshahaqqiqa]

1. This must be stopped

this is our national shame and disgrace. I just hope that Kerry is elected and shuts Gtmo down.

[Mika]

2. FYI, the Platt Amendment is not part of the current Cuban constitution

http://www.classbrain.com/artteenst/publish/article_64.shtml

The Platt Amendment was also incorporated in a permanent treaty between the United States and Cuba.

The Platt Amendment stipulated the conditions for U.S. intervention in Cuban affairs and permitted the United States to lease or buy lands for the purpose of the establishing naval bases (the main one was Guannamo Bay) and coaling stations in Cuba. It barred Cuba from making a treaty that gave another nation power over its affairs, going into debt, or stopping the United States from imposing a sanitation program on the island. Specifically, Article III required that the government of Cuba consent to the right of the United States to intervene in Cuban affairs forthe preservation of Cuban independence, the maintenance of a government adequate for the protection of life, property, and individual liberty, and for discharging the obligations with respect to Cuba imposed by the Treaty of Paris on the United States, now to be assumed and undertaken by the Government of Cuba The Platt Amendment supplied the terms under which the United States intervened in Cuban affairs in 1906, 1912, 1917, and 1920. By 1934, rising Cuban nationalism and widespread criticism of the Platt Amendment resulted in its repeal as part of Franklin D. Roosevelt's Good Neighbor policy toward Latin America. The United States, however, retained its lease on Guannamo Bay, where a naval base was established.