It is hugely encouraging that Barack Obama, on his second full day in office acted on his promise to review the massive national embarrassment that is the Guantanamo Bay concentration camp. While it leaves much still to be desired, his executive order goes a long way to restoring the United States as a member in good standing of the global community; it is distressing that an American president should even feel the need to issue an executive order requiring that his military actually obey the Geneva Conventions — something that should be so utterly part of the DNA of this country, but, after eight years of the Imperium of George III, isn’t. 

The question remains of what will become of the “enemy combatants” who have been held at Guantanamo Bay. To those individuals who have been guilty of little more than having been in the wrong part of Afghanistan at the wrong time the United States owes a great debt. Unless an individual has been tried — tried fairly, without the kangaroo-court “justice” of secret evidence, tried in open court — and found guilty of a specific war crime, he should be released to whichever country he chooses. 

And this includes to the United States. This country simply cannot detain men for years, as many as seven or eight years, without trial, and then just say “RIght, it’s over now — bugger off.” The United States owes these men, and has an obligation to put right the injustice it has committed against them. And, since these men have not been convicted of any crime, there is absolutely no reason for denying them United States residency — it is the very least this country can do. 

Let us lay to rest, by the way, the nonsense that these detainees are “the worst of the worst,” as Donald Rumsfeld’s arrestingly circular logic would have us believe. Why, Donald, are they the worst of the worst? They committed war crimes, of course. And, because they are the worst of the worst, they don’t need trials, apparently. 

This “logic,” this doublethink, this sleight of the hand of jurisprudence was the Bush administration’s way of avoiding the reality of Guantanamo Bay, which was that the detention process was, legally, an utter farce. George III maintained that the men held at Guantanamo Bay were “enemy combatants.” This is a phrase that has no legal standing — hardly surprising, since it was a concept magicked up out of whole cloth by the last president and his men. Any description with a precedent or pedigree would have involved the United States conforming to the norms of that pedigree — calling the Guantanamo detainees “prisoners of war,” for example, would have bound their captors to the Geneva Conventions. And so they weren’t prisoners of war, but rather “enemy combatants,” a new category for which the United States decided it could invent new rules. But since they were prisoners of something other than a war, that must logically mean that the something other than a war in which they were captured was not, therefore, a war. So what was the American military doing in Afghanistan? It wasn’t, apparently, a war. So what were the rules by which this non-war should be conducted? Since there clearly were no rules, none could have been violated. 

We should also question the validity of the assertion that Guantanamo Bay Naval Base is, in some way, not American soil. One can only assume that if, for example, a civilian employee of, say, the Base’s McDonald’s, were to break into the Commander’s office and steal his belongings, he would be held accountable under American law. But why should this be so? If the base is outside American territory, it must surely also be outside American jurisdiction. If the American government wishes to assert jurisdiction over the base, it must also accept that it is bound by its own laws; this it refuses to do.

All of what precedes is the standard dissent against the Bush doctrine of abandoning the Constitution of the United States the moment it gets in the way of expediency. But there is a more fundamental issue with the American naval base at Guantanamo Bay that still needs addressing. The base sits at the south-eastern end of Cuba, a country with which Americans are forbidden from having any dealings. The Cuban Democracy Act of 1992,  and 1996’s Helms-Burton Act, prevent American citizens from conducting trade with Cuban entities. And yet the United States government rents land from the Cuban government for the sum of $2,000 in gold coins per year. The hypocrisy of this contradiction is staggering — the American government tells its people “That thing that we’re doing, that we’ve been doing ever since the Revolucion — you can’t do it. Under pain of prosecution.” 

The Cuban people do not want an American base on their land. An American base in Cuba violates American law. The conduct of the American military at that base contravenes the Geneva Conventions and offends the most basic human rights. President Obama made a good start last week. He still has a very long way to go.