Three years after the initial request, the Pentagon has finally given quasi-permission for United Nations human rights investigators to visit the Guantanamo Bay detention facility. But -and this is a big "but"- they won't have access to the prisoners. Well, why the heck not?
The International Committee of the Red Cross has had access, and they have a long track record of this kind of work. But -and this is another big "but"- they also have a policy of keeping their findings confidential. This seems weird, but it makes a certain sense. The confidentiality is the trade-off for improving the situations of the prisoners and also for allowing unscheduled access. Surprise visits, in other words. And it seems likely that surprise visits would result in the most accurate information.
But the Pentagon and the Bush administration are hiding behind this confidentiality. They want us to believe that national security requires that humans rights investigations be kept to a minimum. Really? Why?
We've already violated the Geneva Conventions in untold numbers of ways. Refusing to register the names of the detainees is only a small example. Much worse, the administration acknowledges in an official report to the UN Committee Against Torture that there has been torture at Guantanamo Bay. And, to his and our shame, Vice-President Cheney is actively campaigning to formally adopt cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment of prisoners as a legal instrument of U.S. policy.
Reject torture as a policy option. Why must this even be said, for heaven's sake? In the most recent State of the Union address, President Bush committed our nation to "stand firm for the non-negotiable demands of human dignity" and to protect "the rule of law." Well, stand up. Do it. Show me that you're protecting human dignity and the rule of law in Guantanamo Bay, because at this point I'll only believe it when I see it. And if, as I suspect, you didn't mean it about human dignity, then understand that there is no political percentage in this. A series of polls (one summarized here: Retro Poll) suggests that somewhere between 72 and 89% of Americans oppose torture as a tool of U.S. policy.
So, what do we do now? I don't mean "the body politic"; I mean you and me. One thing we can do is call our Senators and encourage them to stand strong against the threatened veto of the anti-torture amendment added to the defense appropriations bill. And we might consider reminding Donald Rumsfeld that he's using our money to pay for this war, and we want to know what's happening to prisoners we're detaining. Let the U.N. investigators have access to prisoners.
edited to correct egregious grammar errors.... See what happens when I'm upset?!
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