We’re discovering the worst of Bush in Barack Obama

Hearings are under way in the United States Senate to assess what to do with the 240 detainees still behind bars at Guantanamo Bay, and what will become of the military tribunals and detention without trial that the Bush administration and a compliant Congress put into place. The US Congress is also debating what will happen to the detention camp itself, which was established in 2002 to house men who were allegedly “the worst of the worst,” in a setting deliberately framed by Bush attorneys as “legal outer space.”

According to Wells Dixon, a lawyer at the Center for Constitutional Rights who represents some of the detainees, the Obama administration cannot risk calling the torture practices crimes, so it calls them “classified sources and methods” that cannot be revealed in court. “I can’t even tell you about the way my clients were tortured or I will be prosecuted,” he says. In fact, even the explanation of why this material is classified cannot be reproduced, because it is privileged. Nor has the access of lawyers to their Guantanamo clients improved under Obama. “We are subject in all detainee cases to a protective order,” Dixon says. “Under this order, everything the detainee says is classified,” unless the Defense Department’s “Privilege Team” decides otherwise. Dixon then told me a revealing story about one of his clients, Majid Khan, a so-called “high-value detainee” who was held for three years in CIA “black sites.” Khan was tortured, Dixon said, though “the government would say that what happened to him is an ‘intelligence source or method.’”

Because Dixon has a security clearance, he cannot discuss those classified “sources and methods.” On the other hand, Dixon continued, “When the government does something to [Khan] that they say is classified, they have disclosed to him classified information. But since he doesn’t have a security clearance, there is nothing that prevents him, unlike me, from saying to the outside world, ‘This is what they did to me.’ Nothing prevents that – except for the fact that he is physically in custody.”’ The “logical conclusion,” according to Dixon, is that Khan “must be detained for the rest of his life – regardless of whether he is ever charged with a crime – because if he was ever released, nothing would prevent him from disclosing this information.

Majid Khan – and there are many more like him – is a classic product of the Bush administration’s disregard for the fundamental principles of the rule of law. Unfortunately, Obama’s administration, for all its lofty rhetoric, appears too willing to perpetuate it.

Source: The Daily Star