Kangaroo Courts of Many Sorts

The British government’s recent announcement that it will accept five U.K. residents back home, thereby moving Guantánamo closer to closure, was welcome news.

The Bush Administration’s “secret prison” strategy has been unraveling at a rapid pace. Guantánamo Bay has been the flagship of these prisons, and it is a tribute to the resilience of American values that the ship has been sinking so fast. The British government’s recent announcement that it will accept five U.K. residents back home, thereby moving the prison closer to closure, was welcome news.

While it has always been a nightmare for the prisoners held there, Guantánamo has become a nightmare for President Bush as well. More than 360 prisoners remained on the island, 80 of whom were cleared for release many months ago. Why were the ‘cleared’ prisoners still there? In part, because many face persecution if they are returned to their native countries. As the U.S. State Department struggles to find countries where the prisoners could be sent, its work is complicated by a continuing insistence by the Department of Defense (DOD) that the Guantánamo prisoners are the “worst of the worst” terrorists in the world. Why would any government want to import such ‘terrorists’ simply as a favour to the deeply unpopular Bush administration?

For five years, most countries were happy to scold the U.S. for disrespecting the rule of law, but less keen to support a solution. The British volte face was a commendable exercise in walking the walk, rather than just talking the talk.

Soon after their announcement, though, the Foreign Office was smarting, embarrassed by the Americans, the very folk they were trying to help. Bush’s half-hearted insistence that Guantánamo should close masks deep divisions in his team. Sandra Hodgkinson, Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Detainee Affairs, held a press conference. She welcomed the British offer of assistance and even asked Britain to take more prisoners off American hands. However, still intent on denying that any mistake had ever been made in Guantánamo, she tarred the British residents by name, suggesting that all five were exceptionally dangerous terrorists.

If the Bush Administration seems incapable of toeing a consistent line, the media is even worse. For many months, the British press has chastised the U.S., complaining that the prisoners should be provided with a fair trial rather than the fiercely criticised “Combatant Status Review Tribunals” – kangaroo courts that make sweeping allegations against prisoners, and deny them a meaningful opportunity to respond.

But now swathes of the British press unquestioningly printed Hodgkinson’s allegations, without allowing the prisoners the barest opportunity to reply.

So what would a fair tribunal make of the DOD allegations? Consider the case of Jamil el Banna, whose wife and five small British children are awaiting his return to London. Hodgkinson said, and the media printed, that he had “a long-term association” with Abu Musab al Zarqawi, the Jordanian terrorist infamous for decapitating prisoners in Iraq, who was “behind the murder of Ken Bigley, the British engineer.”

Actually, Jamil knew Zarqawi as a youth, when they grew up in the same neightborhood in Jordan. Indeed, Jamil’s only attempt to contact Zarqawi in recent decades was a letter he wrote from Guantánamo, through his lawyers, telling Zarqawi that his barbaric actions were contrary to Islam, and that Bigley should be freed unharmed. Minimal investigation by might also have prompted the press to point out that Jamil has been cleared by Hodgkinson’s own colleagues in the U.S. military, who had found him to be no threat to anyone.

Or take the case of Omar Deghayes, the Libyan refugee who has lived for 20 years in Brighton. Hodgkinson said Omar is a “jihadi veteran” of the Bosnian war. Last time, the U.S. military claimed that Omar was a Chechen jihadist, shown on a videotape brandishing an AK47. Omar said he had never been to Chechnya, and the man in the video actually turned out to be Abu Walid, a Chechen rebel who died in 2004.

Not satisfied with convicting the prisoners in absentia, the media chastised the British government for executing a U-turn in its policy towards the U.K. residents. Yet surely someone who is driving in the wrong direction would do well to turn around. The media, on the other hand, made a U-turn away from fairness. If there are allegations against them, the Guantánamo prisoners will be glad to answer them in a proper court. Meanwhile, trial by media is little better, really, than the Guantánamo tribunals that have received such justified criticism.

This article also appeared in teh New Statesman.