Guantanamo hangs over Bush visit-- op ed from The Independent

[baby_bear]

http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/opinion/148842_statevisit19.html
Wednesday, November 19, 2003

Guantanamo hangs over Bush visit

THE INDEPENDENT
EDITORIAL COMMENTARY

<snip>

The state visit of President Bush has come to signify all that has gone wrong with transatlantic relations. The royal pageantry that should be a public demonstration of amity is being hidden behind the walls of the Buckingham Palace. The crowds that would, under other circumstances, be cheering this country's most stalwart ally, will be marching in protest. The president will move only in a sealed bubble of security. It will be a tense and contentious three days.
...
Prime Minister Tony Blair, for all his assertions that this is the right visit at the right time, has been let down by Bush over the postwar strategy for Iraq, over the Middle East and, most urgently, over the disgrace that is Guantanamo Bay.
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There is much that we do not know about the prison regime at Guantanamo Bay, for the simple reason that the U.S. authorities -- traditionally a beacon of openness compared with their counterparts in Europe -- have kept international observers out. The administration, therefore, has only itself to blame if we draw the most negative of conclusions based on the few crumbs of information that have escaped from behind the barbed wire.
...
The prison camp at Guantanamo Bay is an absolute negation of everything the United States professes to stand for. There is no openness. There is no accountability. There is no justice. There is only the assumption that because these individuals were captured in and around Afghanistan in the wake of the Taliban's fall, they are, in Bush's own words, "bad guys." What chance can there be of fair treatment when such a tone is set from the top?
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