<font color=blue>'The guys who are running America now are basically just thugs'</font>
Friday, May 09 @ 09:42:15 EDT
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The expected release this week of 20 to 30 Guantanamo Bay detainees does little to reassure Michael Ratner, who is alarmed at the erosion of civil liberties in the US
By Aaron Hicklin, Glasgow Daily Herald
It was a low point in an otherwise successful war. US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld called it an outrage and a breach of the Geneva Convention. But for Americans such as Michael Ratner, a leading civil liberties lawyer, the parading of five US soldiers on Iraqi state television exposed a scandalous double standard.
For the past 18 months, the US has denied legal representation to more than 600 prisoners held without trial in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Some are as young as 14. Many, the administration admits, don't even belong there. Almost as dispiriting for Ratner, the American public seems not to care about this fundamental breach of civil liberties. While the images of shackled marines elicited outrage in the US, similar images of Guantanamo prisoners, on their knees and blindfolded, went largely unnoticed. According to Ratner, it's one more example of how the administration is exploiting public anxiety to roll back decades of legislation designed to keep government in check.
"As long as people are frightened they're willing to give an awful lot of rope to the government," he says. "That is why the fight against what the US does abroad is really about civil liberties here, because as long as we're doing that, there is going to be more terror, and they're going to be able to pass every draconian law they want to."
As president of NewYork's Centre for Constitutional Rights, Ratner has spent most of his career filing suits against international murderers and tyrants, including Nicaragua's Contra rebels, an Indonesian general who led a massacre in East Timor, and the Bosnian Serb warlord, Radovan Karadzic. More often than not his battles put him at odds with his government, but until September 11 and the war on terror, Ratner largely believed time was on his side.
"Since the Carter years, with dips for Reagan, we've essentially been on a rise in which people adhere to fundamental norms, but these guys who are running the country now are basically thugs," he says. "They are taking the most punitive, aggressive position they can, and use the sanction of war to ignore our domestic institutions, just as they are ignoring international institutions. It's as close to a police state as you can get".
Then there is Guantanamo Bay. For Ratner, who is challenging the detention of two Britons - Shafiq Rasul, 24, a law student, and Asif Iqbal, 20, a parcel depot worker, both from Tipton - and two Australians, the government's use of the military base to avoid both US and international law has a precedent.
In 1991, following the overthrow of Haiti's President Jean Bertrand Aristide, the first Bush administration incarcerated hundreds of HIV-positive Haitians at Guantanamo Bay to keep them out of the US. Some of them were told they would be kept there for 10 or 20 years, or as long as it took to find a cure for Aids. When Ratner argued that it was cruel and unjust, a federal judge agreed and the captives were freed.
This time around Ratner has been less fortunate. In March, a federal appeals panel supported the Bush administration, ruling unanimously that prisoners held in Guantanamo Bay could not challenge their detentions in a federal court since the US had no legal jurisdiction over the naval base. The decision left Ratner and his fellow lawyers with a dilemma. If the prisoners at Guantanamo Bay were outside US law, but under US control, to whom could they challenge their detention? The answer, apparently, is no-one.
"Basically there are two ways of treating people - under military law or under our civil law," says Ratner. "The US has set up a third system, whereby they call everyone an enemy combatant, for which there is no legal designation, and then make up the rules as they go along. It's an utterly lawless situation.
This week the Bush administration signalled that it would release some of the detainees imminently. Ironically, the impetus came not from the courts, but from Secretary of State Colin Powell, who wrote to Donald Rumsfeld last weekend arguing that the Pentagon's handling of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay had alienated international support in the fight against terror. Simultaneously, the Pentagon announced rules for military tribunals at Guantanamo Bay that will enable defendants to have American lawyers.
Ratner is naturally happy at this change of heart, but unhappy at the arbitrary way in which it has been determined. "These are not just guys who were picked up on the battlefield in Afghanistan, but people they picked up in Bosnia, in the Philippines, and they just said, 'I'll take you, and I'll take you, but first I'll take you to Bagram and torture you a little, and then I'll put you in Guantanamo with no lawyers, no family visits, no court', all of which is completely against the rule of law, and against what the US has said was objectionable in Nigeria, in Peru, in Chile."
More importantly, the disregard for legal process at Guantanamo is part of a wider philosophy that has given the FBI powers it hasn't enjoyed since the days of J Edgar Hoover. Ratner believes the erosion of civil liberties under Bush is unprecedented.
"Reagan, at least, still fitted within a relatively conventional politics, but these guys have a vindictive and messianic view that is really dangerous. Dissent is key to any democracy, and now you have John Ashcroft [the attorney general] saying he can spy on anyone's political or religious speech, that he can have the FBI in every single mosque in the US, that if your meter reader sees anything suspicious in your home he should report it."
Enter any of the 10 country libraries in Santa Cruz, California, and you will be confronted by a sign that reads, 'Beware, a record of the books you borrow may end up in the hands of the FBI'. The warning is serious, though few libraries are making the effort to alert their customers to what is just one of many new laws aimed at creating a surveillance superstructure.
Ratner blames public ambivalence on a meek and uncritical press, but it also reflects a post-September consensus that civil liberties sometimes have to be sacrificed in the interest of national security. "These are not good times to be a civil liberties attorney in the United States."
Although buoyed by the anti-war protests that rocked European and American cities, he believes a lot of work remains to be done.
The Britons held without charge
Britain now accounts for the single largest group of western foreign nationals held in Cuba. These are the eight detainees:
Feroz Abbasi, 22 A student from Croydon, born in Uganda, Abbasi, who was captured in Kunduz, Afghanistan. He claims that Sheikh Abu Hamza paid for him to fly to Afghanistan to attend an al-Qaeda training camp. In November, a panel of British Court of Appeal judges ruled his detention "legally objectionable".
Jamal Udeen, 33 A website designer from Hulme, near Manchester, arrested in a former Taliban jail. Udeen, who converted to Islam eight years ago, claimed to have been a traveller who was caught up in the fighting.
Martin Mubanga, 29 A motorcycle courier from west London who holds duel British and Zambian nationality, Mubanga was raised Catholic but converted to Islam in his twenties. Reported to have attended terrorist training camps in Afghanistan and to have fought alongside Taliban forces.
Ruhal Ahmed, 20 A student from Tipton in the West Midlands, seized by US forces in Kandahar in January 2002.
Shafiq Rasul, 24 A law student, also from Tipton, captured by Northern Alliance forces in November 2001.
Asif Iqbal, 20 A parcel depot worker, also from Tipton, thought to have been seized in November 2001.
Tarq Dergoul, 24 The son of a retired baker who came to the UK from Morocco in 1970, Dergoul - a former care worker from east London - was arrested after being caught in Afghanistan. One of his arms had been amputated, presumably after being wounded in combat, and part of a foot had been lost from frostbite.
Moazzam Begg, 35 Sent to Guantanamo Bay in February after being held at an Afghan military air base in Bagram for the past year. Raised in Birmingham, he was reportedly seized by two Pakistani officers and two Americans from a flat in Islamabad in February 2002.
Reprinted from The Glasgow Daily Herald:
theherald.co.uk |
