| Terrorist’s rights to test Obama pledge |
WASHINGTON, Jan 26, (Agencies): President Barack Obama’s pledge of bipartisan cooperation with Congress will be tested as he tries to fulfill a campaign promise to close the Guantanamo Bay prison and establish a new system for prosecuting suspected terrorists. The undertaking is an ambitious one. Fraught with legal complexities, it gives Republicans ample opportunity to score political points if he doesn’t get it right. There’s also the liklihood of a run-in with his former presidential rival, Sen. John McCain, a former prisoner of war who before running for president staked his career on overhauling the nation’s detainee policies.
“We look forward to working with the president and his administration on these issues, keeping in mind that the first priority of the US government is to guarantee the security of the American people,” McCain, an Arizona Republican, said in a joint statement with Sen Lindsey Graham, a South Carolina Republican. The statement seemed aimed at putting Obama on notice that he must deal with Congress on the matter.
In his first week in office, Obama ordered the prison at the US Navy base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to be closed within a year, CIA secret prisons shuttered and abusive interrogations ended. So far, Obama’s team has given every indication it will engage lawmakers, including Republicans, on the issue. Graham and McCain were among several Republicans briefed last week by White House counsel Greg Craig and handed drafts of the executive orders.
But once the two sides begin delving into details, there will be ample room for dispute.
Among the unknowns is how many of the 245 detainees now at Guantanamo Bay will be prosecuted. Administration officials said that, pending an internal review, federal and military courts may be used. But, the officials added, a version of the secretive military tribunals, as established under President George W. Bush with the help of McCain, remains an option, too. Officials say the tribunals may be needed to prosecute suspected terrorists who are too dangerous to release but whose cases would otherwise fail,
either because evidence was coerced or trying them in a less secretive court would expose classified information.
Obama could take a page from the Bush administration and try to revamp the system on his own, through executive order. But that approach failed for Bush, who angered members of his own party and wound up seeking congressional approval anyway after the Supreme Court in June 2006 ruled his tribunal system was unconstitutional.
Option
Obama’s other option is to seek legislation on the issue, potentially exposing his administration to a bruising fight with Republicans on how to handle the most dangerous of terrorism suspects.
A narrow majority of Americans supports shutting down Guantanamo Bay on a priority basis. But people are likely to become much less sympathetic to detainee rights if there is another terrorism attack inside the United States or if the new system is portrayed as too lenient on suspected al-Qaeda members.
Republicans already are trying to portray Obama’s review of detainee rights as soft on terrorism. House Republicans on Friday mobilized a “rapid response team” of lawmakers to speak out against the president’s plans.
“The Guantanamo Bay prison is filled with the worst of the worst — terrorists and killers bent on murdering Americans and other friends of freedom around the world,” said House Republican leader John Boehner of Ohio. “If it is closed, where will they go, will they be brought to the United States and how will they be secured?”
Democrats have suggested they expect to be important players in the debate.
Sen Dianne Feinstein of California, who heads the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, said the panel planned to hold back on legislation “for a time” to allow the administration to complete its own assessment. Sen Carl Levin of Michigan, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said he would like “to at least have an advisory role” on the final plan.
In 2006, the question of detainee trials and interrogations enveloped Congress and exposed Republican infighting. McCain, Graham and now retired Sen. John Warner of Virginia sharply challenged Bush’s handling of detainees. In the end, the two sides emerged with complex legislation that outlined the inner workings of military tribunals and defined what constitutes a war crime, effectively banning specific interrogation techniques seen as too harsh.
Human rights groups and Democrats said the system still gave too much power to the president. But now, Republicans are worried Obama will swing too far in the other direction.
Graham, a colonel in the Air Force Reserves assigned to the service’s Judge Advocate General School, said he is concerned that Obama will wind up giving civilian courts too heavy a hand in dealing with terrorists handled by the military and CIA.
“Federal judges in my opinion should not be making battlefield decisions. ... I don’t want to lose sight of the fact that we are at war,” he said.
Painful
Meanwhile, Mohammad Saad breaks into sobs and gut-wrenching moans when he details six years’ humiliation, interrogation and ill-treatment under US orders in Egypt, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay.
At 31 he walks with a limp and needs a stick to cross the drawing room of his brother’s palatial villa in Pakistan’s historical centre Lahore.
“It’s too painful, it’s too deep, it’s too dark and fills me with sadness... They did everything they could to destroy me when I was completely innocent.”
Since returning home in 2008 — six years after he was arrested and years after US investigators said they had no case against him — Saad has undergone one operation to stem infection in his left ear and is waiting another.
Unmarried and an orphan, with little hope of a normal life, he is unmoved by US President Barack Obama’s widely feted decision to close Guantanamo Bay, ‘secret’ CIA detention facilities and outlaw torture.
“Obama’s decision to close Guantanamo Bay is a mere whitewash. Obama has to apologise to the prisoners, to their families and their societies, Saad said.
“They have to apologise to the Muslim world and a whole generation. That’s the least he could do... He should pledge these atrocities will never be repeated and compensate those who suffered any kind of torture.”
Some outgoing US administration officials rejected accusations that tactics amounted to torture and argued that US interrogation techniques such as “waterboarding” or simulated drowning yielded useful intelligence.
Saad says he was 24 years old, a lecturer in Islamic studies and a sought-after reciter of the Koran visiting family in Jakarta when Indonesian agents acting on US orders arrested him before dawn on Jan 9, 2002.
He was kept without food and water, then handed over to an Egyptian at the airport on January 10 to board a special plane.
“They stripped me and started beating me, kicking me in the face but asking no questions. It was utter humiliation. They shackled me from my neck to my knees and took me to the plane. An American official was also there.
“During the flight they slapped me, kicked me and wouldn’t let me use the loo. After a while they gave me a bottle and said I can urinate in that. I arrived in Cairo on January 11.”
In Egypt, he says he was incarcerated in an underground cell for 92 days, his knees and back given electric shocks, and interrogated by Egyptians about Washington’s most wanted man, Osama bin Laden.
Well educated, the son of an Islamic scholar and a master of nine languages, including English, Saad has to strain to hear during an interview with AFP.
In April 2002, he says he was flown to Bagram, the US military-run prison in Afghanistan where he was stripped, shackled and handcuffed.
“After a few rounds of interrogation I was put in solitary confinement for seven months and on March 23, 2003 they transferred me to Guantanamo Bay.”
He says he passed a polygraph (lie detector) test. “They didn’t let me sleep, moving me from one cell to another with hoods and (my) legs tightly shackled. My legs started bleeding.”
He says his interrogators threw the Koran on the floor during his questioning. “They laughed and said ‘Call your God to come and punish us. Call your God’.”
“I went on hunger strike three times. They said they would give me treatment if I cooperated. I was suffering. I was in terrible pain. There was an abject sense of humiliation. I wanted to end my life but I could not.
He denies ever being affiliated to al-Qaeda or extremists, or of visiting Afghanistan.
“They wanted me to confess that I met Osama bin Laden and I went to Afghanistan. I never met him, I never went to Afghanistan,” he says breaking into loud moans and sobs.
In 2004, he says he was told the US government had no case against him and that he would be freed. He was released three years later.
Pakistani security officials say ex-inmates are subject to strict police vigilance and most of the more than 60 Pakistanis who have been released are monitored by law enforcement agencies.
“Can they (the Americans) return those seven years? Never. They have destroyed so many lives. They have turned intelligent, healthy human beings into vegetables,” says Saad. |
| Posted on:
27/01/2009 |
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