Guantanamo Bay prison profanes the Constitution
A direct descendant of the Bastille and letters de cachet that ignited the French Revolution
The Guantanamo Bay detention-imprisonment facility profanes the United States Constitution like the racist Japanese-American concentration camps in World War II.
The facility is also a direct descendant of King Louis XVI’s Bastille to house prisoners without trial based on the King’s arbitrary decrees.
Yet Democratic President Joe Biden and a Democratic-controlled Congress refused to put the quietus to this extraconstitutional monster for two years, 2021-2022.
Courage and statesmanship are made of sterner stuff!
It is altogether fitting that Guantanamo Bay was selected as the site for government lawlessness on steroids. We compelled Cubans under duress to grant the United States a perpetual lease for a naval base in its maiden Constitution. Moreover, Guantanamo Bay detention in lieu of federal prosecution was calculated to conceal rampant CIA torture, a universal crime against all mankind. Confessions obtained by torture cannot be used in criminal prosecutions. As Mark Anthony said in his funeral oration for Caesar, the evil men do live after them, the good is oft interred with their bones.
After 9/11, the United States turned Guantanamo Bay into a facility for the indefinite detention without trial of persons decreed enemy combatants or members of associated forces, an incurably vague term of potentially limitless scope.
9/11 was not war. It was heinous murder on an industrial scale with no capability to endure, as time has proven. Thus, Zacarias Moussaoui, the 20th hijacker, was tried and convicted of mass murder. He is currently serving a life term without the possibility of parole in a maximum security prison in Florence, Colorado.
Every person conceivably implicated in 9/11 could have been charged and prosecuted in federal court for providing material assistance to an international terrorist organization, i.e., Al Qaeda. The conviction rate is virtually 100 percent. Sentences have been uniformly tough.
But the Executive Branch aimed to metamorphose mass murder into war to frighten the American people. It needed stage props. You can’t have a war without POWs and military commissions giving the appearance of war. Guantanamo Bay detention facility was created as theater for a faux war.
Alleged criminals entitled to fair and speedy trials in federal courts with the trappings of due process were transformed into enemy combatants subject to indefinite detention without trial. Combatant Status Review Tribunals presumed guilt in the manner of the Queen of Hearts in Alice in Wonderland and saddled detainees with the burden of discrediting secret allegations.
The history of liberty is a history of procedural protections against miscarriages of justice. Gitmo offers virtually no such protections. The probability of wrongful detentions is elevated because of the handsome bounties the United States offered to anyone who would accuse another of Al Qaeda sympathies.
Over the past 21 years, approximately 800 have been detained at Guantanamo Bay at exorbitant expense while awakening hatred of the United States that could ripen into more international terrorism against Americans. President George W. Bush in his memoir said Guantanamo was “a propaganda tool for our enemies and a distraction for our allies,” but did nothing to end his profanation to the Constitution.
What’s insane about this picture? The national debt has soared past $31 trillion. An additional $19 trillion is projected over the next decade. The carrying costs of a $50 trillion national debt with climbing interest rates will consume the entire federal budget, yet we continue to house 34 detainees at Gitmo at a cost of $13 million per inmate!
President Biden should either prosecute the 34 in federal court (where they would have a right to be present) or release them to their countries of nationality or volunteers. The $13 million saved per capita should be ample to pay any required douceur sotto voce.
The hallmark of the United States, as explained by Justice John Harlan in In re Winship (1970), is “bottomed on a fundamental value determination of our society that it is far worse to convict an innocent man than to let a guilty man go free.” There is no exception for accused terrorists or murderers.
In the opening statement of his essay, Mr. Fein -most agreeably- says: “The Guantanamo Bay detention-imprisonment facility profanes the United States Constitution”.
I will venture out further to say that Gitmo is the name of a place where American servicemen and servicewomen rip and shred their own Constitution into ribbons without any concern and without remorse.
Any new day these American men and women who swear an oath to UPHOLD the Constitution wake up to shred the same, America reaches a day further into the soon enough future where it will inarguably slide into tyranny.
When that day comes, other nations will only smirk and say: “These are the fools who doomed themselves by flouting their own Constitution”.
/s/ Emre Serbest
It's interesting every article is about violations of the Constitution by CIA and other national security establishment agencies. But, no one addresses or even knows about domestic torture programs that is used to enslave American civilians by remote controlled directed energy weapons and neural weapons, wirelessly that torture, desecrate and destroys. Targeted Justice has filed a lawsuit to address this. It's amazing that Americans don't know about the persecution that is going on here, but they have only noticed it in gitmo.