UN: "Shut Down Gitmo"

The United Nations issued a report urging the United States to shut down the detention center in Guantanamo Bay:

The report, summarizing an investigation by five U.N. experts, called on the U.S. government "to close down the Guantanamo Bay detention center and to refrain from any practice amounting to torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment."

It also concluded that the particular status of Guantanamo Bay under the international lease agreement between the United States and Cuba did not limit Washington's obligations under international human rights law toward those detained there.

Many of the allegations have been made before, but the document represented the first inquiry launched by the 53-nation U.N. Human Rights Commission, the world body's top rights watchdog.

Now you won't hear me saying we should do something because the U.N. tells us to. But this is more the U.N. confirming the wrongfulness of Gitmo and our policy of detaining terrorists suspects there indefinitely without charges and without trial. Even if we knew that every single person being held in Gitmo was a terrorist or aided terrorists I'd still have a problem with holding them there forever without charge. But the fact is, we can't even be sure if even most of them have any real connection to terrorism. Kevin Drum at Political Animal has this to say about recent National Journal articles regarding the highly tenuous cases against many of the detainees:

The basic message from these four pieces is that the evidence against an awful lot of the Guantanamo prisoners isn't just weak, it's known to be flatly false. For example, here's an account of Mohammed al-Tumani, a prisoner who was lucky enough to be assigned a "personal representative" who discovered that his primary accuser was a busy man indeed:

Tumani's enterprising representative looked at the classified evidence against the Syrian youth and found that just one man — the aforementioned accuser — had placed Tumani at the terrorist training camp. And he had placed Tumani there three months before the teenager had even entered Afghanistan. The curious U.S. officer pulled the classified file of the accuser, saw that he had accused 60 men, and, suddenly skeptical, pulled the files of every detainee the accuser had placed at the one training camp. None of the men had been in Afghanistan at the time the accuser said he saw them at the camp.

The tribunal declared Tumani an enemy combatant anyway.

There's more like this, and the story it tells is that the problem at Guantanamo isn't just that it's difficult separating fact from fiction when prisoners have been captured in the heat of battle and the witnesses against them are thousands of miles away and untrustworthy to boot. That's a genuine problem, and not one that's easily resolved.

Rather, in too many cases, it turns out the Pentagon is relying on blatantly fabricated evidence against many of the Guantanamo prisoners, and it's doing so even though it knows the evidence against them is blatantly fabricated.

So let's sum up what's going on in Guantanamo Bay. We are holding hundreds of men suspected of having ties to terrorism or of being actual terrorists themselves, and have held them virtually incommunicado for over four years, without charge, without any idea of what to do with them, and we have done so on foreign soil because the operation would be illegal here, and in the process have demeaned ourselves before the world on the issue of human rights. And oh yeah, many of them probably didn't do anything anyway. Shut it down? Yeah, I think so. Shut it down, bring them to the U.S. and charge them, or let them go. Gitmo was the wrong way to go because we could never hope to keep them there indefinitely (even if it wasn't immoral) and thanks to the absolute lack of judicial procedure we can't hope to try many of them with whatever "evidence" we've coerced or tortured out of them. But what's done is done, and at this point we can only shut it down, bring them here, and do the best we can from there.