Guantanamo under law

THE BUSH administration created the prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, as its version of Devil's Island, where jailers' edicts would prevail in place of civil law. A federal district judge took a sledgehammer to this imprisonment yesterday by declaring that the rights of 11 inmates were being abridged in violation of the US Constitution.

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Judge Joyce Hens Green's ruling is at odds with one issued by another federal district judge, which said in effect that the inmates had no rights to violate. A higher court will have to work out which view prevails. Green's reasoning jibes better with a Supreme Court ruling last June. Abuse at the prison is well known, as are cases of unjustified detention. There is little reason for the high court to give inmates the power to sue unless it expected that some of their cases would prevail.

The Bush administration established the prison at Guantanamo because it sits on land leased from Cuba. Neither Cuban nor US law applies, the administration reasoned, so it could do what it wanted with inmates. The Supreme Court noted correctly that the prisoners deserve protection of the US judicial system precisely because the administration took pains to place them beyond the law. "The United States exercises complete jurisdiction and control," the court said, and therefore "aliens held at the base, no less than American citizens, are entitled to invoke the federal court's . . . authority."

If the courts won't interfere, who will stop the torture cited by Green in her decision -- inmates chained hand and feet in a fetal position for 18-24 hours, air conditioning turned off or jacked up to near freezing levels? And, while it did not figure in Green's decision, the recent report that a woman interrogator was using fake menstrual fluid to frighten inmates also illustrates the abuses encouraged by Guantamano's lawless status.

Such incidents do not compare with the horrors perpetrated on Devil's Island, the French prison in South America, closed in 1946, where inmates were worked to death, but the underlying cause of the abuse is the same. Without recourse to judicial review, inmates are at the mercy of sadistic jailers.

After the 9/11 attacks, Congress gave the president sweeping authority to fight terrorism. The Guantanamo prison is the result of that understandable, but, in hindsight, overly hasty action. Its dubious status invites abuse.

Green criticized the tribunals set up to handle prisoner appeals, but did not specify a better system. Bush should establish one that fairly processes appeals, then release inmates that pose no threat, transfer the others to a military prison in the United States, and close the Guantanamo detention camp. If he won't do that, US judges need to keep reminding him that battling terrorism is not an open-ended invitation to violate human rights.