Bush a prisoner of Guantanamo Bay

Guantanamo Bay must now symbolize one more strategic failure of the war on terror. The Bush administration is pretty much alone on this one, with the only coalition support coming from Australia.

Senior judges in Australia, Britain and the European Union have been scathing in their criticism of the military commissions and even supporters of the US Administration - such as the German Chancellor, Angela Merkel, and the British Prime Minister, Tony Blair - have called on Bush to close the prison camp.

Bush a prisoner of Guantanamo Bay

The fact is, they have painted themselves into a corner with Guantanamo, there is no escape clause for George.

"We would like to end Guantanamo. We'd like it to be empty. Trouble is there are some that, if put out on the streets, would create grave harm to American citizens and other citizens of the world," Bush said.

Rhetoric or not, he is trapped by his own words.
But talking of words, the camp's commander, Rear-Admiral Harry Harris, raised the stakes after the suicides of three Guantanamo prisoners over the weekend.

His statement that the suicides constitute "an act of asymmetrical warfare" goes counter to claimed legal basis for the camp, that this is not war but some vague sort of action.

The deaths of a Yemeni and two Saudi prisoners, who hanged themselves, prompted expressions of concern from the White House, but they have no where to move on the issue at present.

Raising the spectre that the camp is possibly a prisoner of war camp the flimsy legal framework the administration has built to justify its existence under International law must surely collapse.

In their well recorded style of simply changing the words and designations, in an attempt to make things more palatable, U.S. government has classified the detainees in Camp X-Ray as "illegal combatants." That title is in place of prisoners of war (POWs), which they claim means that they do not have to be conferred the rights granted to POWs under the Geneva Conventions (at least under that convention).

The U.S. government justifies this designation by claiming that they do not have the status of either regular soldiers or that of guerrillas, and they are not part of a regular army or militia. In short, they created a ‘gray’ military class with equally ‘gray’ justifications.

So not only is the administration, ‘damned if it does and damned if it doesn’t’, the suicides will now put immense, additional International pressure on them to find a solution which George says simply isn’t there.

Speaking about Australia’s David Hicks's, detained at Guantanamo, his Australian lawyer David McLeod, said the deaths were "just dreadful" and it was "very concerning" that prisoners had managed to kill themselves.

"This sort of information about suicide attempts, and now successful suicides, would go around the camp like wildfire and no doubt cause [Hicks] and other detainees to reflect on their own positions," McLeod said.

"Can you imagine what it must be like to be a prisoner in a jail where there have been over 100 attempts at suicide, three of which have finally been successful? Can you imagine what must be the thoughts going through prisoners' minds that would lead you to conclude suicide was the only way out?"

Around 460 individuals of various nationalities are still being held without any evidence against them and with no legal rights.The fact that they have no legal rights is confirmed in a ruling issued by the UN Committee against Torture, which not only requested that the US Government close that arbitrary prison.
The committee also urged the US to change what they euphemistically called interrogation techniques, because they amount to torture, as well as a halt to brutal treatment such as what is called the "submarine technique", in which the prisoner’s head is submerged in water to the brink of asphyxia.

That these prisoners, cut off from the world in virtually every way, can now make such a powerful impact on international opinion underscores the tenuous position Bush finds himself in.

Perhaps had he won a decisive victory, the questions would never have arisen. But a decisive victory in a shadowy, poorly defined conflict, where enemies are as often propaganda constructs as they are real, was never really a possibility.

UPDATE:

A senior US official has suggested that three Guantanamo inmates who committed
suicide had done so as a publicity stunt.

Colleen Graffy, US deputy
assistant secretary of state for public diplomacy, told the BBC World Service
yesterday the suicides were a "good PR move to draw attention".

She
added: "It does sound that this is part of a strategy in that they don't value
their own life and they certainly don't value ours, and they use suicide
bombings as a tactic to further their Jihadi cause."

F**k me foley! Is anyone at home in Washington? I expect the 'publicity stunt' concept has more to do with US admin thinking than it has for these prisoners with no rights and little hope.