The Observer tomorrow reports some encouraging news. The British Attorney General, Lord Goldsmith, is set to give a speech this week in which he will urge that the infamous prison at Guantanamo be shut down.
The decision by the government’s chief legal adviser to denounce the detention centre in Cuba as ‘unacceptable’ will dismay the Bush administration, which has continually rejected claims that the camp breaches international laws on human rights.
But Goldsmith will tell a global security conference at the Royal United Services Institute this week that the camp at Guantánamo Bay must not continue. ‘It is time, in my view, that it should close.’
More from The Observer:
‘There are certain principles on which there can be no compromise,’ Goldsmith will say. ‘Fair trial is one of those – which is the reason we in the UK were unable to accept that the US military tribunals proposed for those detained at Guantánamo Bay offered sufficient guarantees of a fair trial in accordance with international standards.’
Although privately some senior ministers believe Guantánamo should be closed down, no one has so far condemned the camp in such open and trenchant terms…..
Goldsmith’s speech will be welcomed by human rights groups and senior members of the judiciary who have long campaigned for the government to use its influence to persuade its ally to close the camp. The former Law Lord, Lord Steyn, now chairman of the human rights group, Justice, said last month that ‘while our government condones Guantánamo Bay the world is perplexed about our approach to the rule of law.’
Put me down in the perplexed column, please.
Goldsmith’s willingness suddenly to speak out may be part of the general revulsion among Labourites against Tony Blair’s close ties to George Bush. That was brought to a boil this weekend by Blair’s demotion of several ministers, especially Jack Straw, as I commented in my last diary. A report in tomorrow’s Sunday Independent underlines the point I argued on Friday, that the White House was behind the demotion of Straw:
Jack Straw’s fate was sealed in a phone call from the White House to Tony Blair last month, according to the former foreign secretary’s friends.
They say President George Bush was furious that Mr Straw said it was “nuts” to use nuclear weapons against Iran, an option reported to be under active consideration in Washington.
Goldsmith was pushed around pretty fiercely by Cheney’s gang in early 2003; in what must have been a demeaning meeting in Washington, they twisted his arms to declare that an invasion of Iraq would be legal. To his shame, Goldsmith eventually did adopt that position–after declaring, for about a year, that there was no legal justification for an invasion. So perhaps he has decided that the revolt against Blair taking shape just at this moment provides the right occasion to strike back at the Bush administration.
This will not solve the central problem, that Mister Bush, Mister Cheney, and Mister Rumsfeld hold the rule of law and the most basic principles of human decency in contempt. But at a minimum, public pressure from the Attorney General in Britain would be a major incentive to reopen the debate in the U.S. about Guantanamo.
Meanwhile on this side of the Atlantic, a curious development in the tangled tale of torture in Iraq. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, who was named in a government document released last week by the ACLU, has fired back in a most impressive way. As I described on Wednesday, the document comes from an investigation of prisoner abuse conducted by the Defense Intelligence Agency. In its press release about this text, which accompanied the publication of dozens of related documents, the ACLU had the temerity to describe the actual contents of the DIA text.
Among the documents released today by the ACLU is a May 19, 2004 Defense Intelligence Agency document implicating Sanchez in potentially abusive interrogation techniques. In the document, an officer in charge of a team of interrogators stated that there was a 35-page order spelling out the rules of engagement that interrogators were supposed to follow, and that they were encouraged to “go to the outer limits to get information from the detainees by people who wanted the information.” When asked to whom the officer was referring, the officer answered “LTG Sanchez.” The officer stated that the expectation coming from “Headquarters” was to break the detainees.
That did not sit well with Lt. Gen. Sanchez, who defended his honor in an interview with Joseph Galloway of Knight Ridder.
Sanchez said the ACLU “is a bunch of sensationalist liars, I mean lawyers, that will distort any and all information that they get to draw attention to their positions.”
Well, that was a revealing statement. Are we meant to believe it was a mere slip of the tongue? Or does the General believe it’s the duty of men in uniform to belittle those who investigate the torture that was committed on his watch? And how did that occur in the first place, under an officer who is so quick to criticize perceived wrongdoing?
[Sanchez said] “Every document and discussion that was held in Iraq about interrogations highlighted the fact that we were bound by the Conventions.” …
So how did it all go terribly wrong when he’d given orders to work within the limits of the Geneva Conventions? Sanchez blamed the military police brigade assigned to guard the prison. …
Sanchez’s description of his instructions, however, leaves many unanswered questions about how harsher interrogation techniques migrated to Abu Ghraib from the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, when the abuse was first discovered and why it wasn’t ended and the perpetrators punished immediately.
It also remains unclear whether any higher-ranking military officers or civilian officials at the U.S. Central Command, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Department of the Army, the office of Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld or the White House may have given interrogators greater leeway than Sanchez did.
In other words, more than two years after the news of abuse at Abu Ghraib broke into the open, every significant question about how and why this torture occured remains unanswered.
It is good to learn, however, that Gen. Sanchez bears no responsibility himself. I think we can all agree that’s a good first step, finally, toward discovering who did create the horrific conditions in Iraq while he was in command there.
A story of two men in positions of power and responsibility, then, who have very different approaches to righting past wrongs.
