It has become painfully clear that what was long suspected about the Bush Administration's campaign to wipe out the concept of habeas corpus at the Guantanamo Bay detention center in Cuba is indeed a fact. The US government has systematically violated the human rights of many of the detainees and it should immediately free them. Thursday's ruling that five Algerians have been held there for 7 years without due justification is particularly important given that the federal judge who handed down the decision is a Bush appointee who ruled in 2005 that the five inmates had no right to habeas corpus. His judgment on Thursday, however, followed rules handed down by the US Supreme Court earlier this year that said that the defendants - and all those held at Guantanamo - did, indeed, have a right to habeas corpus. Habeas corpus is the term used to describe the right of a prisoner to hear the government describe the reasons for his or her arrest. It is explicitly guaranteed in the US Constitution, a document that was drawn up at the birth of the US as a means not only of describing the structure of the government but also to protect the people of the US from the government itself. Forced to reveal its justification for imprisoning the five Algerians, the US was able to present only an intelligence document quoting an unnamed source who claimed the men were planning to blow up the US Embassy in Sarajevo. In the end, the judge did rule that a sixth Algerian was being held lawfully as there was corroborating evidence that he was a top Al- Qaeda operative in Bosnia. This ruling comes on the tail of another ruling that said the US had no right to hold 17 Uighurs from China as they were not classifiable as “enemy combatants,” a term dreamed up by Bush Administration lawyers to circumvent laws and treaties governing prisoners in time of war. The very existence of Guantanamo is an embarrassment for the US, a shameful creation of a shameful presidency. __
