Guantanamo Splits Administration

Whenever the Bush administration find themselves facing some intractable problem that harms their image abroad, the hand of the worst and most powerful Vice President in American history is never found too far from the wheel.

There are reports in both The Independent and The Washington Post that Bush is keen to shut down the facility at Guantanamo Bay before he leaves office. Which is the least he could do for any successor, after all he is already leaving them an intractable war in Iraq.

The facility at Guantanamo has already proved an embarrassment to many leading Republicans.

President Bush has said he would like the prison to close its doors as soon as is feasible, and Robert Gates and Condoleezza Rice, the secretaries of Defence and State, have indicated their opposition to it.

General Colin Powell, who was the secretary of state when the first detainees arrived at Guantanamo Bay in January 2002, said on Sunday that he thought the facility should be closed and the prisoners moved to jails on the US mainland.

The Democratic opposition to this facility has, naturally, been even harsher:

Guantanamo was not merely a problem but "an international disgrace that every day continues to sully this great nation's reputation", Steny Hoyer, the majority leader and the second ranking Democrat in the House of Representatives, said this week.

The Washington Post pointed out that the problems to shutting it down were what to do with the remaining people held there.

Key discussions have centered on how to repatriate roughly 75 remaining detainees who have been cleared for release or transfer, how to put roughly 80 detainees on trial following major failures in the Military Commissions Act, and where to indefinitely hold an additional 220 detainees the government deems too dangerous to release.

Now, obviously I disagree with any attempt of the US to hold 220 people "indefinitely". The American system was designed precisely to avoid ever giving an American president the powers of a British King, which is exactly the power that Bush is claiming he has when he states that he can pronounce a person "an enemy combatant" and hold them "indefinitely".

Leaving that aside, who is the person who appears to be opposing the move to shut Guantanamo and bring the remaining prisoners to the American mainland? Well, wouldn't you just know it?

While there have been preliminary talks of bringing them to military detention centers in the United States, there has been significant opposition from Vice President Cheney.

The man who voted to keep Nelson Mandela in jail never fails to be on the wrong side of any issue, arguing "against moving Guantanamo detainees to the United States because it would immediately grant the alleged terrorists habeas corpus rights, which would launch another round of legal battles in U.S. federal courts."

If Cheney feels that he is so right concerning how these men should be treated, why is he so afraid of ever having this matter tested before US federal courts?

I suspect it's because he knows that the powers that he claims the President possesses "at a time of war" would not stand up to court scrutiny. After all, the war time powers that certain right wingers are claiming belong to the President were never designed for a war of this kind; a sort of amorphous war with without end; indeed, a conflict which some on the right appear to regard as a "perpetual war".

So, for this reason Cheney and some on the right would rather keep Guantanamo open, despite the fact that it's continued existence greatly harms the US's ability to argue for the expansion of human rights across the globe.

As the outrage has grown, US officials increasingly find that when they press for greater human rights around the world, their arguments are undercut by critics who point to how detainees have been held at the prison for five years or more without charge, in effect incommunicado and without the right of habeas corpus.

Colin Powell took apart Cheney's argument most succinctly last Sunday when he pointed out that every person in every jail in America has had access to lawyers and that, if the US have evidence against the men that it wishes to hold indefinitely, then it need have no fear of putting them in front of a court of law. He also pointed out that Guanatanamo was damaging the US much more than it was aiding it.

Cheney would have the US accept the damage that Guantanamo Bay is doing to it's reputation in order to continue to argue that George Bush has, in effect, the powers of a British King. That's about as un-American as you can get. Especially as one of the reasons that the US has been so admired around the world was because they fought their war of independence against the Brits and wrote their constitution precisely to say that their President didn't have those powers.

So the argument will rumble on and, as always, Cheney will be on the wrong side of it.

Tags: Guantanamo Bay, Torture, indefinite detention, Bush, Cheney, Rice, Powell, Gates, war on terror