Former US chief prosecutor condemns 'law-free zone' of Guantánamo
Ten years on from its creation, calls are mounting from legal and human
rights experts for closure of the 'torture' centre on Cuba
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/oct/30/guantanamo-morris-davis
*
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* Ed Vulliamy <http://www.guardian.co.uk/profile/edvulliamy> in New York
* The Observer <http://observer.guardian.co.uk/>, Saturday 29 October 2011
* Article history
<http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/oct/30/guantanamo-morris-davis#history-link-box>
guantanamo anniversary
A shackled detainee is taken from a vehicle for interrogation at Camp
Delta, at the Guantanamo base in Cuba in 2006. Photograph: Brennan
Linsley/AP
The former chief prosecutor for the US government at Guantánamo Bay
<http://www.guardian.co.uk/profile/morris-davis>has accused the
administration he served of operating a "law-free zone" there, on the
eve of the 10th anniversary of the order to establish the detention camp
on Cuba <http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/cuba>.
Retired air force colonel Morris Davis resigned in October 2007 in
protest against interrogation methods at Guantánamo, and has made his
remarks in the lead-up to 13 November, the anniversary of President
George W Bush's executive order setting up military commissions to try
terrorist suspects.
Davis said that the methods of interrogation used on Guantánamo
detainees – which he described as "torture" – were in breach of the US's
own statutes on torture, and added: "If torture is a crime, it should be
prosecuted."
The US military, he said, had been ordered to use unlawful methods of
interrogation by "civilian politicians, and to do so against our will
and judgment".
Davis was speaking at a conference on human rights
<http://www.guardian.co.uk/law/human-rights> law at Bard College in New
York state. After resigning from the armed forces, in a dramatic
defection to the other side of the raging debate over conditions at the
camp, he became executive director of, and counsel to, the Crimes of War
project <http://www.crimesofwar.org/> based in Washington DC. The speech
was to launch the project's 10th anniversary campaign and to protest
against the existence of the camp and the torture there and at so-called
"black sites" run by US intelligence around the world.
"No court has jurisdiction over Guantánamo," said Davis. "Some senior
civilian Bush adminstration officials chose Guantánamo to interrogate
detainees because they thought it's a law-free zone where we can
unlawfully… handle a very small number of cases. We have turned our
backs on the law and created what we believed was a place outside the
law's reach." He added that America was "great at preaching to others,
but not so good at practising what we preach. There is a point when
enough is enough, and you have to look at yourself in the mirror.
Torture has no place in American courts."
He admitted that "for a couple of years I was a leading advocate of
military tribunals", but at his first meeting as prosecutor "I told my
prosecution team that I would not use any enhanced interrogation
techniques – we didn't need to". However, he continued: "We had these
political appointees telling us to get in there and use them."
Speaking to the /Observer/, he said: "The uniformed services were in
opposition to what was going on. But the military was cut out of the
loop. Civilian politicians excluded the military in establishing the
process and then handed it to me, saying: 'Here, go make it work.'
Political appointees were making the decisions and, so far as I was
concerned, the methods being used were unlawful. They said: 'President
Bush said we don't use torture, so if the president said it's not
torture, who are you to say it is?' " At first, said Davis, "the Bush
administration didn't want civilian lawyers involved. They didn't even
want the Red Cross on the island."
Davis, an expert on the law of war, and former judge advocate for the US
Air Force, said that prisoners at Guantánamo have "fallen between" the
conventions and rules governing prisoners of war. He questioned the
notion of a "war on terror", saying: "Prisoners of war are supposed to
have been captured on the battlefield. Abducting people off the streets
of Indonesia and other places far from Afghanistan is pushing the
envelope on what is a battlefield. The whole world is in essence the
battlefield."
After his resignation in 2007 and retirement in 2008, Morris was
officially deemed to have acted "dishonourably". But, he said: "The
people who said I had behaved dishonourably were all political
appointees. I've had no one from the military or the intelligence
community who has criticised what I did."
Davis's Crimes of War project is leading pressure on the administration
of President Barack Obama during Guantánamo's 10th anniversary, with
firm reminders of Obama's unequivocal pledges to abolish military
commissions
<http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/jan/20/barack-obama-guantanamo-congress-veto> and
close the camp. Professor Thomas Keenan, the head of the Bard College
human rights programme, which staged the conference, said: "The
president campaigned on a pledge to close down the jail at Guantánamo
Bay <http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/guantanamo-bay>, and to end the use
of military commissions to try its inmates. How is it possible that, two
years after he was elected, there are still more than 150 prisoners
there, and this November, one of them will go on trial before one of
those very commissions?"
The 10th anniversary of the executive order will come four days after
the arraignment on 9 November of Saudi-born former millionaire Abd
al-Rahim al-Nashiri
<http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/guantanamo-files/US9SA-010015DP>,
accused of masterminding the attack on the USS Cole that killed 17 US
sailors in 2000. The trial is the first to be held at Guantánamo in
which the government will seek the death penalty.
But lawyers for al-Nashiri, who claim he was tortured at a "black site"
in Poland
<http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/feb/22/poland-cia-rendition-flights>,
will present a motion arguing that the trial is meaningless, since the
government has said it will not necessarily release the accused even if
he is acquitted.
Davis said he thought the handling of terrorist suspects should proceed
"one step at a time, and the first step is to close Guantánamo". Trials
could then be moved to the federal courts.
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