Rendition

Guantanamo is a part of Cuba stolen and occupied by the USA. In that place the US holds people and tortures them in defiance of all the rights that have been fought for and won over centuries, and in particular the right of “habeas corpus”. The USA refuses its victims the status of prisoner of war, but will also not submit to a civil court. They use particularly one-eyed, arrogant and cruel people to run camps for them, such as the Guantanamo base commander Rear Adm. Harry Harris. When three detainees committed suicide at Guantanamo last week, Harris called it an act of war by the poor dead tortured detainees against his grand self and his horrible imperial superiors. See the Reuters article linked below. The process by which people end up as non-persons in the US camps (the new “gulag archipelago”) around the world is known as “rendition”. The European part of the rendition flight network and its destinations can be glimpsed in the linked report from the London Guardian below. The scaly claws of rendition now seem to have reached down to Waterkloof air force base near Pretoria. In November a man called Khalid Mahmood Rashid was sent from there in a Gulf Stream jet, possibly to Mombasa, or possibly to Pakistan. A mordant, short description of what has happened was given by the Rashid family’s lawyer, Zehir Omar, in the hard-copy Mail and Guardian last Friday. Unfortunately it cannot yet be found on the Internet. The South African government’s “justice, crime prevention and security cluster” (actually the husband and wife team of Charles Nqakula and Nosiviwe Mapisa-Nqakula, Minister of Safety and Security and Minister of Home Affairs respectively, plus Justice Minister Brigitte Mabandla, and Minister of Intelligence Ronnie Kasrils) issued a statement blaming Mr Omar, as follows: "Omar's unfounded and deleterious insinuations that our country can engage in abduction - and his unethical behaviour in handling this case - are not only harmful to community relations in our society, but they also have the effect of undermining the international standing of our country." For more from this statement see the News24 article linked below. The Mail and Guardian’s general article on the subject is also linked below. “Habeas corpus” refers to the power of courts to command the state to produce a person. It is one of the foundations of the law as we know it. It goes back at least 700 years. It means that governments are not allowed to “disappear” people, and must account for them when they are arrested. Before “habeas corpus” the “Magna Carta” in England established that the will of the king (i.e. the state) could be bound by law. A court could from then on make an order over the state, such as a “habeas corpus” order. On 18 September 2001 US President George W Bush signed a “Military Order” purporting to suspend the right of “habeas corpus” and to invent from nothing the category of “enemy combatant”, who is neither citizen nor prisoner of war – in effect, a non-person. This “Military Order” is certainly unconstitutional but the US people have not yet got up the courage to throw it out. Outside the US, the Bush policy has been to move people around secretly, often in Gulf Stream jets, so as to avoid the possibility of lawyers applying for “habeas corpus” in any fixed jurisdiction, and so to defeat the ends of justice. This is what they call “rendition”. The linked Sunday Independent article means that there is now going to be, in effect, a “habeas corpus” application to the international criminal court in The Hague, with the intention of compelling all concerned to produce the missing man at a specified place and time. If our government has a good explanation as to why they treated Mr Rashid in the way that they did, then they have been extremely slow to come up with it. In the leary worldwide climate generated by the US “renditions”, it does not look good at all. Click on these links: Three detainees kill themselves in Guantanamo, Reuters (645 words) European involvement in torture flights, The Guardian (1043 words) Rashid wanted to be deported, Omar to blame, News24 (461 words) Khalid Rashid, Government cover blown, Mail and Guardian (1025 words) Rashid hunt goes to the world court, Gordin, Naran, Sindy (716 words)