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Guantanamo: Legal No-Man's Land?

By ANDREW O. SELSKY, Associated Press Writer

Saturday, December 8, 2007

(12-08) 13:56 PST SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico (AP) --

Guantanamo Bay, the only U.S. military base in a country that has no diplomatic relations with Washington, is a concentrated slice of Americana: The Star Spangled Banner blares from loudspeakers every morning as soldiers outside Starbucks stand at attention.

U.S. law protects endangered iguanas on the naval base, but the Supreme Court is struggling to determine whether it also applies to the 305 men imprisoned there.

In the balance hangs America's traditional reputation for justice for all.

Leased by Cuba to the United States 104 years ago under an agreement that can be broken only by mutual consent, the base is firmly in Washington's hands, much to Fidel Castro's annoyance. Washington pays $4,085 a year in rent for the 29,000 acres of cactus-studded hills and pristine deepwater bay, but Castro refuses to cash the checks and recently said the U.S. is illegally occupying the base and using it for "dirty work."

Guantanamo still has a foot in the Cold War — echoes of which are heard when large rodents set off land mines planted in case of communist invasion — but it is also at the center of the Bush administration's war on terror.

The Supreme Court heard arguments last week on what legal protections detainees should be entitled to. The question is surprisingly complicated.

After 9/11, the Bush administration considered Guantanamo the perfect place to keep men suspected of links to the Taliban and al-Qaida, contending the host country's laws do not apply and — since it is not part of the United States — neither do America's. The first detainees arrived in January 2002.

Lawyers for the detainees have challenged that interpretation ever since.

"No other law applies," attorney Seth Waxman told the Supreme Court. "If our law doesn't apply, it is a law-free zone."

Detainee lawyers and human rights groups also argue that military hearings are stacked against the prisoners and are no substitute for regular court proceedings.

Supreme Court justices were intrigued by Guantanamo Bay's unique status. At one point Wednesday, Chief Justice John Roberts asked how Cuban laws apply on Guantanamo, specifically to three elderly Cuban workers who have commuted to work at the base since before Cuba's 1959 revolution.

"If you have two of those workers and they get into a fight over something, one can't sue the other in Cuban courts?" he asked Waxman.

"Absolutely not," Waxman said.

The Bush administration insists that U.S. civilian courts also have little or no jurisdiction over Guantanamo, at least as far as the detainees are concerned, because it "is not a sovereign territory of the United States."

The Military Commissions Act of 2006 sharply narrowed detainees' ability to challenge their confinement, a right known as habeas corpus to which all people on U.S. soil are entitled.

The base certainly looks like America. It features a McDonald's and community housing resembling a 1950s U.S. suburb, and boasts a huge Fourth of July fireworks display.

And the military does apply some U.S. laws, including the Endangered Species Act, which outlines how iguanas must be treated. The base's 25 mph speed limit is strictly enforced, which helps avoid roadkill, according to public affairs officer Bruce Lloyd.

"There is a very consistent effort by the command to protect the iguanas and other exotic species here, which I assume is partially driven by the federal law," he acknowledged.

Tom Wilner, an attorney who represents detainees, said his team has raised the iguana issue in briefs to the Supreme Court.

"Anyone, including a federal official, who violates the Endangered Species Act by harming an iguana at (Guantanamo), can be fined and prosecuted," Wilner said. "Yet the government argues that U.S. law does not apply to protect the human prisoners there. ... Pretty absurd."

Justice Anthony Kennedy, considered a pivotal vote in the Guantanamo case before the Supreme Court, has already revealed his leanings on what laws apply at Guantanamo. In a 2004 opinion, he said: "Guantanamo Bay is in every practical respect a United States territory."

Madeline Morris, a Duke University law professor who advises the chief defense counsel at Guantanamo war-crimes trials, said the United States needs to establish legal procedures for suspected terrorists.

"We see ad hoc military trials and detentions, and neither comport with basic principles of the rule of law," she said.

But the Supreme Court decision is not expected for many months.

"I fear and expect that it will drag on until legislation is in place that actually provides viable alternatives," Morris said in a phone interview from Guantanamo.

___

Andrew O. Selsky, the AP's chief of Caribbean news, has visited Guantanamo several times.

These orchestrated attacks on Chávez are a travesty

A social revolution is taking place in Venezuela. No wonder the neocons and their friends are determined to discredit it

By George Galloway

02/28/07 "The Guardian" The chilling Oliver Stone film Salvador got a rare airing on television this week. It was a reminder of a time when, for those on the left, little victories were increasingly dwarfed by big defeats - not least in a Latin America which became synonymous with death squads and juntas. How different things seem now. Yesterday US Vice-President Dick Cheney came uncomfortably close to the reality of Afghan resistance to foreign occupation. On the same day Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez delivered a mightier blow to the neocon dream of US domination, announcing an extension of public ownership of his country's oil fields - the richest outside the Middle East.

Much more is at stake than London mayor Ken Livingstone's welcome oil deal with Chávez, which will see London bus fares halved while Venezuela gets expertise from city hall and a bridgehead in the capital of the US's viceroy in Europe. Washington's biggest oil supplier is now firmly in the grip of a social revolution. This month I watched with Chávez as thousands of soldiers, French and British tanks, Russian helicopters and brand new Mirage and Sukhoi fighter bombers passed by: the soldiers chanting "patria, socialismo o muerte" - enough to make any US president blanch. Chávez answered the salute with the words: "the Bolivarian revolution is a peaceful revolution but it is not unarmed".
The music played throughout the event was the hymn of Salvador Allende's 1970s Chilean government, declaring that the people united will never be defeated. But Chávez's socialism is a good deal more red than Allende's - and its enemies seem no less determined than those who bathed Chile in blood in 1973. Despite complete control of Venezuela's national assembly - the opposition boycotted the last elections after being defeated in seven electoral tests in a row - Chávez has been given enabling powers for 18 months to ensure he can pilot his reforms through entrenched opposition from the civil service, big business, the previously all-powerful oligarchy, their vast media interests and their friends in Washington. Among those friends we must include our own prime minister, who only last year declared Venezuela to be in breach of international democratic norms - though when I pressed him in parliament he was unable to list them.

The atmosphere in Caracas is fervid. The vast shanty towns draping the hillside around the cosmopolitan centre bustle with workers' cooperatives, trade union meetings, marches and debates. The $18bn fund for social welfare set up by Chávez is already bearing fruit. Education, food distribution and primary healthcare programmes now cover the majority for the first time. Queues form outside medical centres filled with thousands of Cuban doctors dispensing care to a population whose health was of no value to those who sat atop Venezuela's immense wealth in the past.

Chávez, who regularly pops over to Havana to check on the health of Fidel Castro, is at the centre of a new Latin America which is determined to be nobody's backyard. Reliable US allies are now limited to death squad ridden Colombia, Peru and Mexico - and latterly then only by recourse to rigged elections. But Chávez's international ambitions are not confined to the Americas. He became a hero in the Arab world after withdrawing his ambassador from Tel Aviv in protest at the bombardment of Lebanon by US-armed Israeli forces last summer, and has pledged privately to halt oil exports to the US in the event of aggression against Iran. This all represents a challenge to US power which, if Bush was not sunk in the morass of Iraq, would be at the top of his action list.

Not that his supporters are marking time. The mendacious propaganda that Chávez is a dictator and human rights abuser is being spread with increasing urgency by the Atlanticist right and their fellow travellers, such as leftie-turned-neocon Nick Cohen who told his London newspaper audience last week that Livingstone's relationship with Chávez was making him think of voting Tory. Chávez's decision not to renew an expired licence for an opposition television station involved in a coup attempt - there are plenty of others - is being portrayed as the beginning of the death of democracy. It's as if Country Life's diatribes against the fox hunting ban were taken as irrefutable proof of totalitarianism in Britain.

The so-called "dictator" Chávez is nothing of the kind. He has won election after election, validating his radical course. Still the fear of a coup - such as in 2002 when Chávez was removed and imprisoned for three days before millions descended to the presidential palace to reinstate him - is everywhere. One Englishman abroad who welcomed the 2002 coup as the "overthrow of a demagogue" was the foreign office minister Denis MacShane - a humiliating correction had to be issued following Chávez's restoration. That tale underscores the importance of the links being forged between revolutionary Caracas and anti-war London. Chávez is well aware that the people were defeated in Chile, the fascists allowed to pass in Republican Spain. Just as in Venezuela, the defence against counter-revolution lies with the poor and the working people who are shaping the world they want; so too must all those internationally who want to see this ferment reach its potential rally to Venezuela's side.

George Galloway is the Respect MP for Bethnal Green and Bow and presents a radio show three times a week on TalkSport
www.Georgegalloway.com

Gore Vidal's State of the Union

Today, the 31st of January, in the hallowed year, election year 2006, could be a memorable day if we all do our part, which is simply to concentrate, among other things, and do perhaps what a couple of groups have decided would be useful for the President, I guess his State of the Union. We might give him some idea of our state, which is one of great dissatisfaction with him and his regime. And there’s talk of perhaps demonstrating in front of the Capitol or here or there around the country to show that the union is occupied by people who happen to be patriots. And patriots do not like this government.

This is an unpatriotic government. This is a government that deals openly in illegalities, whether it is attacking a country which has done us no harm, two countries—Iraq and Afghanistan—because we now believe, not in declaring war through Congress as the Constitution requires, but through the President. “Well, I think there are some terrorists over there, and I think we got to bomb them, huh? We’ll bomb them.” Now, we’ve had idiots as presidents before. He’s not unique. But he’s certainly the most active idiot that we have ever had.

And now here we are planning new wars, ongoing wars in the Middle East. And so as he comes with his State of the Union, which he is going to justify eavesdropping without judicial warrants on anybody in the United States that he wants to listen in on. This is what we call dictatorship. Dictatorship. Dictatorship. And it is time that we objected. Don’t say wait ‘til the next election and do it through that. We can’t trust the elections, thanks to Diebold and S&S and all the electronic devices which are being flogged across the country to make sure that elections can be so rigged that the villains will stay in power.

I think demonstrations across the country could be very useful on this famous Tuesday. Just say no. We’ve had enough of you. Go home to Crawford. We’ll help you raise the money for a library, and you won’t even ever have to read a book. We’re not cruel. We just want to get rid of you and let you be an ex-president with his own library, which you can fill up with friends of yours who can neither read nor write, but they’ll be well served and well paid, we hope, by corporate America, which will love you forever.

So I think it is really up to us to give some resonance to the State of the Union, which will be largely babble. He’s really not going to try to do anything about Social Security, we read in the papers. He has no major moves, other than going on and on about the legality of his illegal warrantless eavesdroppings and other breakings of the law.

I had a piece on the internet some of you may have seen a few days ago, and there’s a story about Tiberius, who’s one of my favorite Roman emperors. He’s had a very bad press, because the wrong people perhaps have written history. But when he became emperor, the Senate of Rome sent him congratulations with the comment, “Any law that you want us to pass, we shall do so automatically.” And he sent a message back. He said, “This is outrageous! Suppose I go mad. Suppose I don’t know what I’m doing. Suppose I’m dead and somebody is pretending to be me. Never do that! Never accept something like preemptive war,” which luckily the Senate did not propose preemptive wars against places they didn’t like. But Mr. Bush has done that.

So this is a sort of Tiberius time without, basically, a good emperor, and he was a good emperor in the sense that he sent back this legislation, which was to confirm anything he wanted to have done automatically. And they sent it back to him again. And then he said, “How eager you are to be slaves,” and washed his hands of the Senate and went to live in Capri, a much wiser choice, just as we can send this kid back to Crawford, Texas, where he’ll be very, very happy cutting bushes of the leafy variety.

You know, it’s at a time when people say, ‘Well, it makes no difference what we do, you know, if we march and we make speeches, and this and that.’ It makes a lot of difference if millions of Americans just say, “We are fed up! We don’t like you. We don’t like what you’re doing to the country and what you have done to the country. We don’t like to live in a lawless land, where the rule of law has just been bypassed and hacks are appointed to the federal bench, who will carry on and carry on and carry on all of the illegalities which are so desperately needed by our military-industrial corporate masters.”

I think a day dedicated to that and to just showing up here and there around the country will be a good thing to do. And so, let the powers that be know that back of them, there’s something called “We the people of the United States,” and all sovereignty rests in us, not in the board rooms of the Republicans.

Gore Vidal is the author of more than twenty novels and five plays. His recent national bestsellers are Dreaming War and Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace. His latest book is called Imperial America: Reflections on the United States of Amnesia.