Some call it a hot issue, others call it a violation of the Geneva Convention. According to J. Wells Dixon, an expert on Guantánamo Bay prisoners who recently visited Creighton, it’s a legal black hole, and he’s working to fix it.
Dixon, an attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights in New York City, spoke on Sept. 25 at the Creighton University School of Law. Dixon has represented prisoners at the Guantánamo Bay naval base in Cuba.
His speech covered a variety of topics, including the legality of what the government is trying to do at Guantánamo Bay, his personal experiences visiting the prisoners and the controversial subject of the United States military’s use of torture at the prison.
Dixon said Guantánamo Bay was just a relic of the Cold War before the September 11 attacks. After that day, the United States aggressively sought out those responsible for the attacks and used Guantánamo Bay as a place to hold suspects.
“We were told by the administration that it was the legal equivalent of outer space, that is, a place where no law applied,” Dixon said. “(They) wanted to find a place where they could detain and interrogate — without interference.”
Dixon and his colleagues argued that the prisoners deserved basic rights, such as habeas corpus and due process, but the government said the prisoners didn’t have these rights because they weren’t American citizens. The Supreme Court decided in June 2004 that the Guantánamo Bay are entitled to these common law rights.
Dixon said that an important victory for those representing the prisoners was the right to go to Guantánamo Bay. Starting in August 2004, lawyers from the CCR were able to go to the naval base.
“In doing that, we’ve been able to pierce the veil of secrecy surrounding Guantánamo Bay,” Dixon said, “and to really shed light on what was a very dark place.”
Dixon has since been to the base several times. Most of the prisoners are from all over the world, not just Iraq and Afghanistan. And contrary to the administration’s account that the prisoners were the “worst of the worst,” Dixon said, according to government records, most of the prisoners at Guantánamo Bay are not suspected terrorists. Most have little intelligence value and only about five percent were captured by the United States.
“The overwhelming majority of people in Guantánamo Bay have been turned in for bounties,” he said, “ranging anywhere from $5,000 a piece to $1 million or more.”
Dixon said he was confident that, if the prisoners at Guantánamo Bay were given their basic right of habeas corpus, the guilty would be punished and the innocent would go free.
“That’s the way the system was designed to work,” he said. “To sort out who should be released and who shouldn’t be released.”