Guantanamo inmates to lose all rights

Guantanamo inmates to lose all rights
US law proposal attacked by campaigners

By David Rose

11/13/05 "The Observer" -- --

Human rights

campaigners are calling
it the 'November surprise' - a last-minute

amendment smuggled into a
Pentagon finance bill in the US Senate last

Thursday.

Its effects are likely to be devastating: the

permanent removal of
almost all legal rights from 'war on terror'

detainees at Guantanamo
Bay and every other similar US facility on

foreign or American soil.

'What the British law lord Lord Steyn once

called a legal black hole
had begun to be filled in,' said the British

lawyer Clive Stafford
Smith, speaking from Guantanamo, where he

represents more than 40
detainees. 'It looks as if it is back, and

deeper than before.'

If the amendment passes the House of

Representatives unmodified, one
of its immediate effects is that Stafford Smith

and all the other
lawyers who act for Guantanamo prisoners will

again be denied
access, as they were for more than two years

after Camp X-Ray opened
in 2002.

The amendment was tabled by Lindsay Graham, a

South Carolina
Republican, and passed by 49 votes to 42. It

reverses the Supreme
Court's decision in June last year which

affirmed the right of
detainees to bring habeas corpus petitions in

American federal
courts.

As a result, about 200 of Guantanamo's 500

prisoners have filed such
cases, many of them arguing that they are not

terrorists, as the US
authorities claim, and that the evidence

against them is unreliable.

None of them were given any kind of hearing

when they were consigned
to Guantanamo. Instead, the Americans

unilaterally declared they
were unlawful 'enemy combatants', mostly on the

basis of assessments
by junior military intelligence personnel, who

were often reliant on
interpreters whose skills internal Pentagon

reports have criticised.

The Supreme Court's 2004 ruling also meant that

the handful of
prisoners facing trial at Guantanamo by

military commissions, which
do not follow the normal rules of evidence and

due process, have
been able to file federal challenges to their

legality.

Last Monday, the Supreme Court announced it

would review the
commission rules by agreeing to take the case

of Salim Hamdan, a
Yemeni detainee and allegedly once Osama bin

Laden's driver. The
Graham amendment, if passed, will stop this

case, and the
commissions will operate without further

scrutiny.

Michael Ratner, the director of New York's

Centre for Constitutional
Rights which brought the 2004 case, said the

amendment 'will create
a thousand points of darkness across the globe

where the United
States will be free to hold people indefinitely

without a hearing,
beyond the reach of US law and the checks and

balances in our
constitution.'

A senior Pentagon lawyer who asked not to be

named said that the
Graham amendment will have another consequence.

The same Pentagon
bill also contains a clause, sponsored by

Graham and the Arizona
Republican John McCain, to outlaw torture at US

detention camps - a
move up to now fiercely resisted by the White

House. 'If detainees
can't talk to lawyers or file cases, how will

anyone ever find out
if they have been abused,' the lawyer said.

Most of the evidence of abuse at Guantanamo has

emerged from
lawyers' discussions with their clients.

Human rights groups and leading figures from

the US military are
urging the Senate to reconsider the amendment

next week. Among those
who have written open letters are John Hutson,

the former Judge
Advocate General of the US Navy, and the

National Institute for
Military Justice, a think-tank for military

lawyers.

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