05/23/05

Last month, in a little-noticed vote, the Senate rejected Democratic Senator Robert Byrd's proposal to delete funding for the US prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. The amendment to the Emergency Supplemental Appropriations Act for Defense, the Global War on Terror, and Tsunami Relief, 2005 would have stripped HR 1268 of $36 million earmarked for construction of a permanent, 220-person military prison at Guantánamo. Opponents of the amendment said a new prison would keep detainees from being transferred to the United States, where terrorists might seek to free them. These folks may well see the US federal courts, which now hear the Guantánamo inmates' habeas corpus petitions, as 'terrorist.' Before the Supreme Court instructed the Bush administration it must give prisoners access to our courts to challenge their detentions ... the International Committee of the Red Cross called the Guantánamo prison a 'legal black hole...

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/052305B.shtml

from TruthOut, by Marjorie Cohn


Informant: Thomas L. Knapp