The Muslim community and the anti-war movement will share the joy of the families of British prisoners released from the US military prison camp at Guantanamo Bay. But what of the over 650 still incarcerated? PIERS MOSTYN looks at the politics behind the prisoners' release. Kal international legal sanders- ept in brutal conditions in breach of
subject to isolation, sleep deprivation, torture and intense heat - the prisoners have been held incommunicado and without charge or trial on an indefinite basis for over two years.
Bush and Blair gambled that a combina.•. tion of the limited release of detainees with an ongoing smear campaign against the rest would diffuse the issue. But this has not been the case.
If five out of the nine Britons held pose no "security threat" - as Blunkett stated -what's to say that the majority of detainees of other nationalities aren't similarly innocent? The releases have exposed the fraudulent foundations for all the detentions and indeed for the very existence of the camp.
The anti-war movement internationally was not distracted by Bush's lies about the supposed threat posed by the detainees, and without its strength there would have been no releases.
The release of the five has correctly been universally interpreted as a political decision. Some suggest that it stems from a pending US Supreme Court case which may ultimately rule against Bush in the run up to his reelection bid in November this year. But at ... Sacrificing the innocent: Blair best this presents only part of the picture.
An analysis of why the camp was set up in the first place is necessary. It has long been apparent that this was not to detain "enemy combatants captured on the field of battle", as warmongers like Rumsfeld routinely claim. Some were kidnapped far from the fighting in Afghanistan, in places like Pakistan or even Zambia.
Consider the question: why should the US government detain people who were obviously innocent in the first place when it must have known that an eventual release would expose the absence of evidence against them?
Inevitably there was an underestimation of the opposition to war and an overestimation of its success. But these detentions were never intended to be exercises in justice - a trap that many liberal commentators fall into.
This was muscle-flexing designed not just .... .... There can never be fair trials for the remaining Guantanamo prisoners.
....
It also set up a parallel scheme of internment without trial at Belmarsh, dubbed "Britain's Guantanamo" by Amnesty International. And the government ther spent six months trying to do shoddy deals to save face - apparently involving blocking the