Washington – The Republican chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee challenged Congress on Wednesday to help define legal rights of terrorism detainees at Guantanamo Bay, bemoaning a “crazy quilt” system.
Pentagon and law-enforcement officials defended current practices at the U.S. military prison camp.
“It may be that it’s too hot to handle for Congress, may be that it’s too complex to handle for Congress, or it may be that Congress wants to sit back as we customarily do,” Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa., said as his panel took testimony on practices and policies at the U.S. military camp at a U.S. Navy base in Cuba.
The hearing came against a backdrop of growing reports of U.S. abuse of terrorism-war prisoners at the camp.
Sen. Patrick Leahy of Vermont, the senior Democrat on the committee, said the prison is “an international embarrassment to our nation, to our ideals, and remains a festering threat to our security.”
Military and Justice Department witnesses said extraordinary steps were being taken to protect unspecified rights of prisoners and to process their cases.
Rear Adm. James McGarrah, who monitors the “enemy combatant” detention program for the Navy, told the panel that of the 558 detainees given hearings at Guantanamo, 520 were “properly classified” as enemy combatants.
Of the remaining 38, he said, 23 have been released.
Michael Wiggins, deputy associate attorney general, told the committee that each Guantanamo detainee was given a formal hearing in front of a review panel to ensure they were all properly classified as enemy combatants. But he acknowledged that holding the detainees is not “for criminal justice purposes, and is not part of our nation’s criminal justice system.”
Their detention “serves the vital military objectives of preventing captured combatants from rejoining the conflict and gathering intelligence to further the overall war effort, and to prevent additional attacks against our country,” Wiggins said.
“I think any fair analysis would say that we have a crazy quilt which we are dealing with here,” Specter said, citing disappointment with his own past attempts at legislation to more clearly define rights and procedures for enemy-combatant detainees .
Air Force Brig. Gen. Thomas L. Hemingway told the panel, “America is at war. It is not a metaphorical war. It is as tangible as the blood, the rubble that littered the streets of Manhattan on Sept. 11, 2001.”
Of the detainees, “We are holding them humanely,” Hemingway said.
Asked how long they could be held, Hemingway said: “I think we can hold them as long as the conflict endures.”
