Close Guantanamo and Return It to Cuba

[polly7]

By Marjorie Cohn
Source: teleSUR English
November 15, 2015

Col. Morris Davis, former Chief Prosecutor for the Terrorism Trials at Guantanamo, personally charged Osama bin Laden’s driver Salim Hamdan, Australian David Hicks, and Canadian teen Omar Khadr. All three were convicted and have been released from Guantanamo. “There is something fundamentally wrong with a system where not being charged with a war crime keeps you locked away indefinitely and a war crime conviction is your ticket home,” Davis wrote to Obama.

Of the 780 men held at Guantanamo since 2002, only eight were tried and convicted of war crimes. Of those, just three remain at Guantanamo.

Many of the detainees reported being assaulted, prolonged shackling, sexual abuse, and threats with dogs. Australian lawyer Richard Bourke, who has represented several Guantanamo detainees, charged they have been subjected to “good old-fashioned torture.” Detainees who engage in hunger strikes are subjected to force-feeding, a practice the UN Human Rights Council has called torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment. At least seven men have died at the prison camp.

The United States has illegally occupied Guantánamo since 1903, after Cuba’s war of independence against Spain. Cuba was forced to include the Platt Amendment in the Cuban constitution. The amendment granted the United States the right to intervene in Cuba as a prerequisite for the withdrawal of US troops from the rest of Cuba. That provision provided the basis for the 1903 Agreement on Coaling and Naval Stations, which gave the United States the right to use Guantánamo Bay “exclusively as coaling or naval stations, and for no other purpose.”

President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed a new treaty with Cuba in 1934 that allows the United States to remain in Guantánamo Bay until the US abandons it or until both Cuba and the United States agree to modify their arrangement. According to that treaty, “the stipulations of [the 1903] agreement with regard to the naval station of Guantánamo shall continue in effect.” That means Guantánamo Bay can be used for nothing but coaling or naval stations. Article III of the 1934 treaty also says that Cuba leases Guantánamo Bay to the United States “for coaling and naval stations.” Nowhere in either treaty did Cuba give the US the right to utilize Guantánamo Bay as a prison camp.

Full article: https://zcomm.org/znetarticle/close-guantanamo-and-return-it-to-cuba/

[cstanleytech]

1. Sorry but the argument that its void because they are keeping people there prisoner doesnt fly.

I do agree however that we should turn it back over to Cuba though because really in this day and age its no longer needed for our navy to operate really.

[Judi Lynn]

2. The only honorable thing to do about Guantanamo Bay, Cuba is to get the hell out immediately. n/t

[Mika]

3. The US has a responsibility to clean up the toxic waste site there!

There's a huge toxic waste site there, from all of the decades of plane & machine maintenance and construction. Plus herbicides. Much of it bulldozed into unmarked pits and covered over.