Key Figure in Guantanamo Bay Prison Camp Now Thinks It Should Never Have Been Built
August 6th, 2013Via: Daily Mail:
The Pentagon official in charge of Guantanamo Bay has admitted that if he had his time over, he would have argued that the notorious detention camp should never have been built.
William Lietzau, America’s Deputy Assistant Defence Secretary for Detainee Affairs, told The Mail on Sunday in an exclusive interview that Guantanamo’s detainees should have been legally designated as prisoners of war and held in Afghanistan, or if charged with crimes, taken to prisons in America.
Mr Lietzau – who, after three and a half years in his job, last week announced he will be stepping down to take a private sector job in September – added that the best way for President Obama to close Guantanamo would be to announce that the ‘war’ with Al Qaeda is over.
Under international law, this would end any justification for continuing to hold prisoners who had not been charged with crimes.
Lietzau’s words will be seen as explosive, because alone of senior officials who serve the Obama administration in this field now, he played a key role in creating Guantanamo under George W. Bush.
As a senior military lawyer from early 2002 to mid-2003, he designed the Guantanamo ‘military commissions’ – special tribunals set up to try terrorist suspects.
These have proved a dismal failure. Their rules have repeatedly changed, and more than a decade after five men accused of plotting 9/11 were captured, their case is bogged down in pre-trial hearings which have no end in sight.
Well, I suppose that qualifies this as one BIG “Whoops!!”
Let’s take that one HUGE step further, and say that the US federal government never should have been built. Or, even bigger than that, no governments should have ever been built.