According to an article in the May 25 British newspaper The Mail on Sunday, Miller said U.S. authorities would conduct the trials and executions of prisoners held there without leaving the camp’s boundaries. Another option being considered, Miller told The Mail, was building a permanent jail, with an execution chamber.

“It is not surprising the authorities are building a death row because they have said they plan to try capital cases before these tribunals,” U.S. law professor Jonathan Turley told the press. “This camp was created to execute people. The [Bush] administration has no interest in long-term prison sentences for people it regards as hard-core terrorists.”

Miller’s announcement comes as the Pentagon prepares to begin trying prisoners at Guantánamo before military tribunals. U.S. president George Bush is supposed to individually select who among them will stand trial.

Since they were authorized by President Bush in November 2001, the defense department has been preparing a series of guidelines to be used by these kangaroo courts, giving the Pentagon complete control of the proceedings—including naming of the military commissions to hear the cases, approving charges, reviewing the findings, and imposing sentences.

The U.S. government holds 680 inmates from 43 countries at Guantánamo—territory it occupies against the will of the Cuban people—indefinitely, in subhuman conditions, with no charges, after having labeled them “enemy combatants.” Many have been subjected to what can only be described as systematic torture. The prisoners include at least three boys between the ages of 13 and 15, whom U.S. authorities have cynically labeled “juvenile enemy combatants.”

Most of the inmates were brought to this concentration camp immediately following the U.S. war on Afghanistan. Many were shackled and blindfolded for the 24-hour flight and were originally held in outdoor wire-fence cages. The U.S. government has since built the more permanent Camp Delta facility. Each cell has a through-floor toilet, a sink, and a metal bed. Denial of exercise and reading material is used as a “disciplinary tool,” according to Command Sgt. Maj. John Vannatta, the superintendent of the prison. There have been 25 suicide attempts by 17 individuals since the prison opened. More than 5 percent of the detainees are being treated with antidepressants.

Washington has attempted to justify these brutal conditions and its refusal to abide by international rules on prisoners of war by claiming the prisoners are “unlawful combatants,” and therefore excluded from protections for such inmates spelled out in the Geneva Convention. By holding the prisoners on Cuban soil, the U.S. government also claims to be bound by fewer restrictions than it would face inside the United States.

The U.S. rulers have sought to set a precedent, claiming the military trials they are planning for the Guantánamo prisoners were never intended to offer protections identical to those under U.S. courts; nor are they like courts-martial, where the defendant is offered basic protections, and the findings are subject to independent judicial review.

Under the guidelines set by the Pentagon, if the military tribunal’s rulings are challenged, a three-member panel selected by the secretary of defense will review the rulings before a final decision is made by President Bush or defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

Donald Rehkopf, co-chair of the military committee of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers criticized the rules “as crafted to guarantee convictions, compel guilty pleas, and make it as easy as possible to get the death penalty.”

In the meantime, the Supreme Court declined May 27 to hear an appeal made by New Jersey newspapers, challenging the government’s powers to hold secret deportation hearings in the cases of hundreds of immigrant workers detained after Sept. 11, 2001.

The Bush administration has defended the policy of holding secret hearings in cases it deems of “special interest” because of possible connections to “terrorism.”

According to Washington, about 505 of the 760 detainees designated as “special interest” by the government have been deported.  
 
 
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