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WYDEN TESTIFIES ON GUANTANAMO FACILITY
AT ARMED SERVICES HEARING
Senator recently returned from trip to Camp
Delta in Cuba
July 14, 2005
Washington, DC – U.S.
Senator Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), who recently visited the U.S. detention
camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, today testified before the U.S.
Senate Committee on Armed Services’ Subcommittee on Personnel.
The hearing was intended to discuss military justice and detention
policy in the global war on terrorism.
Senator Wyden’s prepared
testimony follows:
U.S. Senator Ron Wyden
Prepared Testimony before the Senate Committee on Armed Services
Subcommittee on Personnel
Thank you for inviting me to
appear before you today. I commend you for holding this hearing.
Current practices on detention and rendition deserve to be examined
very closely by Congress, and I am very glad this matter is finally
getting some of the attention it deserves.
I would like to start off by
saying that I agree with the Bush Administration that this is
a war, and that the individuals at Guantanamo are not garden-variety
criminal defendants. But the Administration is not right to say
that just because we are at war, there should be no rules. None
of us wants to put the American people at risk by releasing dangerous
individuals. At the same time, none of us wants the way that we
treat detainees to become the Achilles’ heel of U.S. anti-terrorism
policy.
I saw the policy on detention
in practice when I traveled to Cuba last month with Senator Nelson
and visited Camp Delta in Guantanamo Bay. I believe there needs
to be vigorous, concerted oversight of practices at Guantanamo
and other, similar facilities. Now having visited there, in my
view the most glaring problem that Congress needs to address is
the legal status of these detainees.
Senator Nelson and I were in
the room where the Combatant Status Review Tribunals take place,
and we were briefed on the Administrative Review Board process.
These procedures were established to determine whether individuals
pose a threat to the United States. The U.S. soldiers who are
involved in these proceedings are good people. They are trying
hard to do the right thing. But frankly, I don’t know how
they sort it out without a compass. By asking them to conduct
reviews without establishing clear rules they can follow, the
federal government has put them in a very difficult situation.
These soldiers need guidance
and standards provided to them so that they can do their jobs.
Even the reasons that detainees are being held need to be better
defined. Many, for instance, have what is known as “intelligence
value”. If the U.S. is holding people because there is reason
to believe that they have knowledge of active terrorist cells
or operational planning, then that’s in our national security
interests. But if the evidence indicates that they are not dangerous,
continuing to hold them requires a different set of standards.
I’m interested in protecting the national security interests
of this country, not in creating a human reference library made
up of individuals who no longer pose a threat to the United States.
Of course, some prisoners are
not being held because of their intelligence value, but because
they are dangerous. The absence of clear rules here raises some
questions that Congress ought to explore. For example, Article
21 of the Geneva Convention would seem to provide the government
with stronger grounds for holding detainees than the rules currently
being employed by the Administration. That article says that if
foreign nationals are members of a group that is in armed conflict
with the United States, the United States has the right to capture
them and hold them prisoner until they are no longer dangerous.
I realize that al-Qaida is not a conventional army, but perhaps
those Conventions, which are sometimes dismissed as soft and lofty
liberalism, can point us to a proper approach in law, that would
have the added advantage of having a strong legal precedent.
Based on what Senator Nelson
and I observed and learned at Guantanamo, I remain very concerned
about past instances of unacceptable practices at Guantanamo and
elsewhere. However, I believe that improvements have been made
to procedures and conditions - at least at Guantanamo. I strongly
prefer even this situation to the inevitable alternative: further
outsourcing of prisoner interrogation to countries with a questionable
commitment to human rights and the rule of law.
Our servicemen and servicewomen
at Guantanamo have been given a very tough assignment. They are
working incredibly hard. While in Cuba, I had the chance to sit
down with soldiers from Oregon and talk to them about their experiences
serving at Guantanamo. These men and women are doing a great job.
But Congress is making those
soldiers’ job much harder than it needs to be. Colleagues,
we could make their job a lot easier by enabling them to operate
in an environment where the rules are clear. Some of the soldiers
and sailors at Guantanamo Bay have been unfairly maligned by being
associated with the errors of their government. By allowing Camp
Delta to become a modern-day Bastille where prisoners may be held
under humane conditions, but are still kept indefinitely, with
no formal charges and little legal recourse, is not likely to
change Guantanamo’s image around the world as a recruiting
poster for al-Qaida. A better solution is for Congress to write
rules for detainees that are solidly grounded in United States
law, and to hold ourselves to a higher standard of conduct than
those who seek to erode our freedoms.
I look forward to working with
all of you on this issue.
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