Mr. Warren will oversee all of the Center’s legal, advocacy and education work in protecting and advancing the rights guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, including the Center’s dockets on Guantánamo, Government Misconduct, International Human Rights, Racial & Economic Justice and Corporate Accountability.
Vincent Warren, CCR
To the rest of the world, Guantánamo is a symbol of overreaching presidential abuse of power, of arrogance, hypocrisy, lawlessness, and torture. To the Bush administration, it is merely a public relations disaster and, as such, it must be fixed, not by providing fair hearings to the detainees and ensuring that due process and the laws of the land are respected, but by mounting a vigorous and well-orchestrated PR campaign in response. One of the most damning documents on Guantánamo to be produced is known as the Seton Hall report and showed, analyzing the government’s own documents, that 92 percent of the people at Guantánamo were not Al Qaeda fighters and that 55 percent had been found by the military to not have committed any hostile act against the U.S. or our allies.
The Center for Constitutional Rights has represented the detainees at Guantánamo from the very beginning. We have visited men driven to despair with less and less faith that they would ever see justice, men who were turned over for enormous bounties to the U.S. because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time, or men who were fleeing the conflict, or men who were cooks, goatherders and other minor actors swept up and locked away, now lost to their families and branded terrorists forever. At most, five percent of the men at Guantánamo were captured by U.S. forces. In five years, only ten people out of 786 at Guantánamo have ever been charged with a crime; only one ever went before a Military Commission, and not a single one is currently charged.