by Martin Jay, Strategic Culture:
The recent news that Lloyd Austin wishes to annul a plea bargain between the man accused of being the architect of the 9/11 bombings and the U.S. authorities has thrown the spotlight on Guantanamo Bay – a colossus of U.S. hypocrisy with regards to human rights and how rarely America practices what it peaches around the world in terms of international law.
Guantanamo, a space in Cuba which the U.S. government leases from the government in Havana is considered not to be U.S. territory, and, we were told, was created to try terrorists. It was created by President Bush in 2001 and despite almost 800 prisoners passing through it, only 8 to date have been convicted.
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Twelve years after the jihadists from Egypt, Pakistan, Algeria and even Morocco who fought for the Americans in Afghanistan were discovered to be causing more problems for the U.S. than what was expected, it is as though Bush created the base to contain the ‘wild ones’ which refused to stay on the U.S. payroll and take their orders in places like Iraq and Syria. Those governments of these countries tricked the west. They knew that when they emptied their prisons of their extremists to send them to Afghanistan, they would never be allowed to return to their own countries. America needed a legal system which skirted its own laws and those of the rest of the world which it had agreed to with various human rights treaties it signed. Guantanamo.
Nowadays it is making the news for being a travesty of international justice as it seems to break all of the laws that the U.S. signed international accords to and mostly draws media attention for all the wrong reasons: usually its champion abuse of human rights.
Just recently Lloyd Austin dismissed the plead deal between the U.S. government and “KSM” the accused Pakistani of 9/11 bombing and a host of other terror acts. Khalid Sheik Mohamed recently signed a plea deal so as to spare his own life, but his case has drawn international wrath as the testimony he signed was done so during torture. Lloyd’s move seems like a pointless gesture given that KSM is going to live out his entire life in Guantanamo and was never really going to be executed anyway. The evidence against him is unknown and it is unclear whether the U.S. has anything against him other than the sworn statement which he signed after being waterboarded over 170 times.
KSM and two others originally made their pleas in 2008 but accepted the possibility of being given the death penalty. They then withdrew these later to consider a deal which could exclude the death penalty as they saw that it was most unlikely that the U.S. would embarrass itself on the world stage while it tried to hang suspects based on statements made through torture. It is because of this that you might wonder why Americans don’t question the legal credibility of Guantanamo as the rage that 9/11 victims have should arguably be directed at those who created this oddity in the first place. Halfwits like Senator Lindsey Graham, who remarkably was a military judge at one point in his career, spouse idiotic statements about the base’s validity and use, but in reality it is becoming less of a symbol of U.S. hegemony and more of an ugly wart which the American elite are afraid to have surgically removed – preferring to hope that it might just disappear one day.
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