Contrast this with our feeding these scum, "culture appropriate" food.
There are no locations more suitable or convenient, short of an isolated Pacific island.The Pacific would be a big inconvenience. If our greatest concern was 'avoiding the watchful eye of the press,' rather than adhering to the Geneva Convention requirement the author conveniently ignores- that of not parading prisoners before journalists and the public, and preventing them from being exposed to public ridicule. The other Geneva convention requirement is to get prisoners as far away from the battle zone as possible- for their own safety and for the security of the captors. the author ignores this as well. The third reason to take them to Cuba is that no nation is obligated by ANY law or treaty to take prisoners into their territory for 'storage' or for prosecution. Our reluctance to bring hundreds of prisoners here is for OUR safety- and I have no argument with that.
And if we really wanted to 'avoid the press' to hide our treatment of the prisoners, we sure as heck wouldn't have published general pictures of the facilities or captives from a distance. In fact, if we wanted to avoid press problems completely, we would simply never acknowledge receipt of the prisoners and would instead keep them in Afghanistan only long enough to glean them for information and to dig their graves for final disposal. Or drop them encased in concrete in the deepest ocean trench we can find.
As the world's lone superpower, the United States has a responsibility to uphold international law to its highest standard;
Um, no, in fact we do not have ANY such responsibility. The US is a world power for one reason: it is the absolute best way to ensure that Americans are well defended. As such, the highest obligation of the US is to defend our own interests and our own people, according to OUR law, which is the highest law. Why is our law the highest law? Well, the United States is the only nation which acknowledges that all men are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights (trial in the US is not one of those inalienable rights, BTW). Since no other nation, nor international agreements, share this view, and instead they believe that people's liberty comes from government- no other human authority, however international in scope, is supreme to our own law. Period.
That in the process of tending to our own interests we tend to defend a whole lot of other people's interests is purely coincidental, and rather nice for international public relations, but certainly not an obligation on our part. Now, if someone else wants to be a world power so they can have the absolute best defense for their people, they're going to have to work for that status just as our nation did. And if they want to uphold and enforce 'international law' they will have to become a greater superpower than we, or else they will only be able to uphold international law so long as it does not conflict with US interests. That's life.
the Bush administration should afford the prisoners at Guantanamo the same basic rights it would if it thought the public was watching.
It is assuming the public is watching, and they are getting all the rights they are entitled to by international and US law. The simple fact is, there isn't a whole lot of law out there to protect people who do not fit the definitions of lawful combatants, and treating unlawful combatants as POWs demeans true POWs and renders the Geneva Convention moot. In addition, it would lend legitimacy to and encourage terrorist tactics over tactics of war- and that would be an aggregious error.
US law places non-US prisoners captured on the battlefield outside of this country, firmly in the hands of the US military- in other words, in the hands of the executive branch of government. This is the enforcing branch, not the judicial branch. They are not nor should they be in the hands of the civil judicial system since our civil system does not have jurisdiction outside our borders any more than any other country's civil systems extend into international territory.
To benefit from US civil courts, you must be in the US or be extradited to the US under conditions that require civil court procedings. Not all extraditions do- sometimes nations just want to be rid of the people as much as we want to get ahold of them. Where no such extradition conditions exist, a prisoner's status is up in the air. The reason we treat people INSIDE the US - even foreign nationals that have resided in the US legally - under the civil system, is not because we are concerned about a terrorist's rights, but because we need to preserve American citizens' rights. We would not want to confuse, intentionally or unintentially, US citizens for foreign nationals and end up denying a citizen his or her rights.
***
I do disagree with the new idea coming out that citizenship is 'meaningless.' I do not agree that noncitizens should have just as many rights under our system as citizens. I believe that we should treat visitors and immigrants as citizens- only if legal- to the civil rights normally accorded to citizens... but only as a very important courtesy which we can publicly deny in times of war or emergency to prospective visitors, permitting them to decide for themselves if they wish to risk it and enter the country. Those not wanting to remain in the US in such times may leave immediately, if they wish to remain, they may seek special recognition of their status which entitles them to full civil rights protection.
Illegals, however, should never be equated with citizens, legal immigrants, or lawful visitors. Distinctions are important to protect the civil rights of US citizens, legal immigrants, and legal visitors- blurring the concept of citizenship rights and obligations endangers our liberty just as surely as any draconian security laws.