Guardian UK: Bush's Guantánamo policy falls apart

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Bush's Guantánamo policy falls apart
Yesterday's court-ordered release of Guantánamo detainees has far-reaching implications for the future of the prison

Ken Gude
guardian.co.uk, Friday November 21 2008 21.00 GMT


The Bush administration's Guantánamo policy is collapsing all around them as they pack their offices and prepare to leave Washington. At a steady pace through the last few years that accelerated this summer and into the fall, US judges have been unravelling the faulty legal basis used to construct and sustain Guantánamo. The latest rebuke is perhaps the most significant. For the first time a federal judge has ruled on the merits of the government's evidence against a group of detainees it contends are enemy combatants, and Judge Richard Leon ordered five of the six Algerians in the case be released from custody "forthwith". This decision will have far-reaching implications as president-elect Barack Obama develops his plans to close Guantánamo and return US detainee policy to firm legal footing.

The legal process that culminated in Judge Leon's decision began many years ago on the simple premise that the detainees at Guantánamo deserve a fair an impartial forum to defend themselves against the Bush administration's assertion that they are enemy combatants. Successive victories for the detainees in the US supreme court, followed by setbacks at the hands of the legislative and executive branches, have drawn out this sad saga to the penultimate days of the Bush administration. It is tragic that it has taken so long but certainly fitting that it occurs before President Bush slinks out of town.

This summer, the supreme court finally cleared away all the obstacles put in place by the Bush administration and a compliant Congress that prevented a fair hearing on the evidentiary basis for the detainees' detention. Famously, in the first such hearing, a federal judge in Washington ordered the release of 17 Uighurs detained at Guantánamo for more than six years even though the Bush administration admitted they were never enemies of the US.

But the case before Judge Leon was different from that of the Uighurs because the six Algerians were accused by the Bush administration of being al-Qaida terrorists plotting to bomb the US embassy in Sarajevo and travel to Afghanistan to join the fight against US and coalition forces. The Bush administration believed the evidence against these detainees was so strong that the Sarajevo embassy allegation made it into President Bush's 2002 State of the Union address. Now, the level of veracity required by President Bush's speech writers has never been very high, yet the elevation of these detainees into a premier example of the success of the Bush administration's anti-terrorism campaign demonstrates that this was not just an ordinary case. .......(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2008/nov/21/guantanamo-closure-al-qaida