Heritage expert gets the facts on Guantanamo Bay
August 30, 2006| By Nathaniel Ward
James Carafano will inspect the Guantanamo Bay terrorist detention facilities to see what the situation there is really like. At the invitation of the Department of Defense, Heritage national security expert James Carafano will visit the Guantanamo Bay terrorist detention facilities on Thursday. He tells MyHeritage.org that the trip will allow him to “to see for myself the conditions on the ground” and to inspect “how prisoners are treated.” He will also examine “what’s being done to repatriate prisoners that no longer need to be detained.” Carafano’s one-day trip follows his testimony last month to the Senate Armed Services Committee about the Supreme Court’s June ruling in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld that the military cannot use special tribunals to try captured terrorists. “What is needed is a process that does not treat unlawful combatants as regular criminals or traditional prisoners of war,” Carafano told the Senators. “Congress can satisfy its legal and national security obligations explicitly by authorizing the proposed military commission process.” The terrorist detention facility on the Guantanamo Bay military base was established after the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, Carafano wrote in July, “to detain unlawful combatants—enemies picked up on the battlefield and other places who did not qualify as traditional prisoners of war under the Geneva Conventions.” America needs “to come up with a long-term solution for adjudicating the status of the detainees,” he continued, “that satisfies both U.S. national security interests and the rule of law.” Nathaniel Ward is the Editor of MyHeritage.org—a website for members and supporters of The Heritage Foundation. | |
