Issue 36, Mon Jan 17th 2005

America Promises Final Solution for Camp Internees
By Lolo Laroche in Washington


The Bush administration has finally reacted to heavy criticism throughout the world community over its treatment of the Arab prison population in the Guantanamo bay concentration camp.

The US had been strongly condemned for

• Its treatment of prisoners: One FBI agent described in a memo seeing prisoners at Guantanamo shackled, hand and foot, in a foetal position for up to 24 hours at a time, and left to defecate on themselves.
• Its refusal to apply the Geneva convention to the prisoners held there, the first time since the second world war that a democratic nation has openly refused to apply the convention.
• Lack of legal process: There is no mechanism to prosecute or free the prisoners held in Guantanamo bay. In effect prisoners have been prosecuted of no crime, but can be held indefinitely.
  

The US yesterday reacted by setting up a new legal framework to judge the prisoners. The system, which will use a new form of tribunal, where 5 officers from the US military will act alone as both judge and jury, will now review the case of each prisoner, deciding whether the ultimate death sentence by electric chair or lethal injection should be applied. The process will not, the US claimed, be open to appeal, nor will the internees have legal support of any form available.

Critics said that on this, the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz in which millions were forcibly transported, held, tortured and killed, the US administration’s decision to call this a “final solution” was unfortunate.

Meanwhile a spokesman for the Bush administration was at pains to point yesterday out that as Guantanamo bay holds Arab prisoners, rather than Jewish ones, any historical comparisons were "inaccurate."


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