Due Process Rights and Guantanamo Bay

In the section titled "Civil Liberties and Combating Terrorism", 9/11 and its effect on civil liberties is analyzed, leading to one of the most disputed inceptions of Post 9/11 America, Guantanamo Bay Detention Camp in Cuba. Established in 2002, the facility housed thousands of supposed terrorists connected with the Iraq and Afghanistan war, under the Bush administration.

First off, the Human Rights complaints of this place were endless streams of everything from Chinese  water drip torture, to beatings, to sleep deprivation, to many other different types of psychological and physical torture, most of these reports coming from released inmates.

Additionally, the way the prisoners got to the facilities were sketchy as well…. I will never forget watching a video in Mr. Hinely's ninth grade World Geography class about Guantanamo Bay and how at the initiation of the war, pamphlets were dropped from planes over different villages in Afghanistan advertising awards for people who would "turn in" people who they thought to be terrorists. The reason this stuck out in my mind is because it made me reminisce on the tales family members have told me about Stalin-led Russia, specifically my grandmother. My grandmother was a manager at a plane factory in WWII, a prestigious position where she had many friends, but with prestige can come enemies. Of course somebody had said something claiming she was against Stalin or something of that sort, and she was taken into questioning for days without contact till she was finally released…unlike my great grandpa who under the same regime was taken to one of Stalin's internment camps in Siberia, only to return years later. It was always described to me as "your neighbor doesn't listen to you when you say to trim their hedges, so you tell the authorities that they are against Stalin and your neighbor disappears for years or for good." This similar tactic may have been the reason for thousands of people who some were even found innocent were taken from their homes to this torturous place, Guantanamo Bay, because there was something in it for the person turning them in.

Of course we need to learn not to make the same mistake twice in history, and after this… three times in history and even more that haven't been mentioned.

But what does this all have to do with due process rights?

Illegal incarceration and torture are considered to be federal crimes! For this reason, in 2004, the Supreme Court ruled that the detainees had a right to habeas corpus, which is a court order in which a judge requires authorities to prove that a prisoner is being held lawfully and that allow the prisoner be freed if the judge is not persuaded by the government's case. The rights imply that prisoners have a right to know what charges are being made against them, something many Guantanamo prisoners did not know especially because some were being held without trial! Bush argued that under the Military Commissions Act of 2006, detainees had significantly less rights of habeas corpus and that the act eliminated the right to challenge the detention, transfer, treatment, trial or conditions of confinement of the detainees. But in 2008 in Boumediene vs Bush, the Supreme Court ruled that the provision of the Military Commissions Act  that stripped detainees of this right to hear habeas corpus petitions.

When Obama took office he vowed to close down the controversial facility by 2010 and having the prisoners moved to Illinois.  Additionally, he assisted the efforts by holding trials for some of the detainees like a man named Khalid Shaikh Mohammed for his role in the 9/11 attacks. The book presents this political cartoon in order to illustrate the trials, indicating American's view of the trials and the detainees, as if they were entertaining, a mockery, and that the man on trial wasn't a man but a freak of nature, the way acts are presented at circuses like compared to in the cartoon.



Since then Guanatamo Bay has been mostly closed under the Obama administration, but the issue of legality and the human rights violations are still very fresh in our minds.