Senate to Discuss Rights of Enemy Combatants
Source: Associated Press, via WRAL.com
The continuing uproar over U.S. treatment of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib has a top Senate Republican looking at the need to clarify in law the rights of foreign detainees.
On the heels of Amnesty International calling the U.S. detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, “the gulag of our time,” Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Arlen Specter, R-Pa., will hold hearings this month on the treatment of foreign terrorism suspects there. Earlier this week Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld described Amnesty’s characterization as “reprehensible.”
Late Friday, the Pentagon for the first time confirmed several incidents in which the Quran had been mishandled at Guantanamo Bay prison. The incidents included a soldier deliberately kicking the Muslim holy book, an interrogator stepping on a Quran, and a guard urinating near an air vent splashing urine on a detainee and his Quran.
The Pentagon is working on new guidelines for handling people captured during wartime, including an explicit ban on inhumane treatment. The 142-page draft document is being written by the office of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and is not intended to set policy but rather to provide the military with guidance to implement detainee policies set by civilian authorities. Specter, according to an aide, is in the preliminary stages of drafting a bill to establish procedures for detentions and exploring the possibility of making the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act Court the venue for challenging them.
Amnesty International has called on the United States to close its Guantanamo prison, where about 540 men are being held on suspicion they have links to Afghanistan’s ousted Taliban regime or Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaida terror network. While the human rights watchdog worries about Congress putting into law “enemy combatant” status, which it says is a category of prisoner not sanctioned by international and humanitarian treaties, it applauded Specter for looking into the issue.
“Any kind of sunshine would be a good antiseptic for this situation,” said Jumana Musa, advocacy director for human rights and international justice at Washington-based Amnesty International USA. Specter’s hearing will focus on the detention of enemy combatants at both Guantanamo and in the United States, and whether trying them before military tribunals provides them adequate due process, the senator’s aide said. [Text continued at site.]
Kudos to Sen. Specter. I know I’m not the only one wondering when the prisoners at Guantanamo will ever even receive hearings — of any type. Creating guidelines for any sort of process is a step in the right direction, and Specter’s aide’s comments suggest that the guidelines will at least have some oversight by civilian lawmakers. Whether or not this fully addresses the situation described by Amnesty International remains to be seen, but this is a much better response than President Bush’s and Secretary Rumsfield’s comments about the report.