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"Will Not One But Two Guantanamos Define the American Future?" PDF Print E-mail
Monday, 19 April 2010 10:27

http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175234/tomgram%3A_karen_greenberg%2C_the_two-guantanamo_solution/#more

Karen Greenberg, , the executive director of the Center on Law and Security at the NYU School of Law, talks about the real meaning of the proposed “Closing Guantanamo” solutions.

from the article:

    The administration’s disingenuousness on this point is overwhelming. On the one hand, we are told that the terms “war on terror” and “enemy combatants” are history and that Guantanamo will soon join them. But Guantanamo was never purely a place in Cuba. What made it so wrong was the system of indefinite detention that lay at its core and that continues to defy the rule of law as defined by the U.S. Constitution, U.S. military law, and the international conventions that this country has signed onto.

    Closing Guantanamo does not simply mean emptying the prison cells at that naval base and throwing away the keys. It means ending the policy that has become synonymous with Guantanamo -- of incarcerating individuals without the need to prove their guilt, and without a clear and recognizable process for determining the grounds for their detention.

    Faced with opposition in Congress and in public sentiment generally, the Obama administration increasingly seems focused on ending not the conceptual nightmare we call Guantanamo, but the irritating problem that Guantanamo represents.  Unfortunately, as this administration will learn to its regret, there is no closing Guantanamo if preventive detention continues. 

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