X-RAY OF HOPE

Obama and his transition team are drawing up plans to close Guantánamo. Brilliant news, long overdue, but let’s not get carried away. Instead of trying current detainees in US criminal courts, there is speculation that a new court will be designed specially to handle “sensitive national security cases”. This would purposely relax standards and restrict defence and public access to classified evidence.

Closing Guantánamo should in theory uncover the despicable practices carried out at the facility as well as in the US’s strategic secret prisons in countries such as Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq. There is, however, little mention of how Obama plans to curtail the outsourcing of torture and extraordinary rendition - as experienced by UK resident and Ethiopian national Binyam Mohamed. He languishes in Gitmo, with charges against him based on confessions extracted using torture (see SchNEWS 638). Binyam worked in London as a janitor and was captured in Pakistan in April 2002. It is alleged that he was connected to a plot to detonate a radioactive ‘dirty bomb’ in a US city.

Binyam, Brighton resident Omar Deghayes, and the majority of inmates in Guantánamo were actually caught by bounty-hunters as they fled into Pakistan from Afghanistan after the US invasion in 2001. At the time the US military were handing out cash rewards for every ‘terrorist’ handed in.

This will be one of the first tests of Obama’s resolve, as we see whether the detainees will be given a fair legal process, humanitarian protection, and if appropriate, asylum in a suitable country. Call us cynical but the move to close Guantánamo works well as PR to convince the world of America’s new found humanity, but Gitmo is just the tip of an iceberg and much of what else goes on happens much less visibly. Since many of Obama’s new administration are well to the right of him, it may be too optimistic that those responsible for war crimes will be held accountable.

* See www.andyworthington.co.uk and www.redpepperobamablog.blogspot.com