Thanksgiving message [Archives:2007/1107/Opinion]
By: Marc Falkoff
Today is the Thanksgiving holiday in the United States, a day when American families by tradition gather together and offer thanks to God for their health and happiness. Because it is not unusual for adult children to live hundreds and even thousands of miles from their parents and grandparents, for many Thanksgiving is one of the few times during the year when families are reunited. For many Americans, myself included, this holiday is typically spent among brothers, sisters, uncles and aunts, and is always a very emotional time.
This morning, circumstances are such that my wife and I must celebrate the holiday alone in Chicago, while our families congregate hundreds of miles away, in New York and Boston. Although we will enjoy the holiday nonetheless, we are both melancholy about not being with our families. In our home, the smells of a roasting turkey are the same, the holiday decorations are the same, and the Thanksgiving parade broadcast on the television is the same. But without family, the holiday feels somehow empty.
So, today we are melancholy. But, as has been the case for more than three years, it is impossible for me to feel self-pitying for long. For more than three years, I have represented more than a dozen Yemeni who have been imprisoned at Guantanamo since January 2002. These men – your fathers, your uncles, your brothers, your sons, your countrymen – have had not contact with their families for nearly six years. Many Eid feasts have come and gone, and many marriage and birth celebrations have taken place while these men sat in solitary confinement in small, steel-and-concrete prison cells on an island thousands of miles from their families.
Consider how long your countrymen – none of whom treated in accord with the Geneva Conventions – have been separated from their families. The wife of one of my clients gave birthday to a daughter not long after my client was brought to Guantanamo nearly six years ago, which means that my client has never seen or spoken to his five-year-old daughter. Husbands have been separated from wives, fathers from children, and sons from parents for more than half a decade. Some of my youngest clients have now spent a quarter of their lives behind bars, uncharged and untried, having been treated at times barbarously.
It does not have to continue like this. More than 770 men from dozens of countries have been detained at Guantanamo since 2002, but more than 400 of them have subsequently been released. Saudi Arabia, for example, has had 100 of its 130 citizens returned from the prison camp. Yemen is now the country with the largest number of prisoners at Guantanamo, and only 12 of its 110 citizens – including 1 of my clients – have been released during the past 6 years. A thirteenth Yemeni was returned in a body bag, having died under suspicious circumstances at the prison. Even more frustrating, a number of the Yemeni detainees – including 2 of my clients – were designated years ago by the military as eligible to be released back to Yemen, yet they are still in prison on the remote Cuban island.
Why are so many Saudis and so few Yemenis back home? According to an article in today's Boston Globe newspaper, U.S. officials say the answer is simply that “Saudi Arabia has been more assertive than Yemen on the issue.” Saudi Arabia has also chosen to invest significant resources in a “rehabilitation program that includes religious reeducation, psychological counseling, furnished apartments – even brides.” The head of the Pentagon office that reviews evidence against the Guantanamo detainees told the same newspaper that Saudi Arabia was “willing to come up to the plate,” and that if more countries followed suit, more detainees would be released “in a heartbeat.”
I personally believe that for many (if not most) of the Guantanamo prisoners from Yemen, any reeducation or rehabilitation program is unnecessary because many (if not most) of these prisoners are in fact innocent of any wrongdoing whatsoever. But if all that stands between my clients' continued imprisonment and their transfer back home is the lack of a similar rehabilitation program, then surely it is in the Yemen citizenry's best interest for you to demand that your leaders establish a similar program.
The government would not need to start from scratch. As many of you know, Judge Hitar has had great success running a similar program in Yemen, convincing extremists to renounce their anti-social beliefs by engaging in dialogue about the true meaning of the Holy Qur'an. If President Saleh and the Yemen government were to beef up this program, devote more significant financial resources to it, and perhaps consult with the Saudis about the structure of the program, then there seems an excellent chance that we will begin to see more repatriations from Guantanamo.
I do not place the blame entirely on the Yemen government, of course. To my mind, the U.S. should return the prisoners immediately to Yemen, for the simple reason that their continued detention is illegal – a patent violation of the American Constitution, the Geneva Conventions, and international law. But realities are realities. If you want your countrymen to come home then you, the citizens of Yemen, must demand that your leaders work more proactively for their release.
Today, my wife and I are separated from our families, but we still give thanks to God for the blessings we have received. We recognize that we are lucky and privileged. As we sit down to our meal, our thoughts and prayers will go out to my clients who remain at Guantanamo, having been separated from their families for far too long. I hope that Mahmoad, Majid, Yasein, Saeed, Abdulsalam, Adnan, Jamal, Othman, Adil, Mohamed, Abdulmalik, Aref, Sadeq, Farouk, Salman, and Makhtar are in your prayers as well.
Marc Falkoff is a professor of criminal law at Northern Illinois University. Along with the firm Covington & Burling, he represents sixteen Yemeni men who have been detained at Guantanamo for nearly six years.
This article was written on Thanksgiving day marks 21st Nov.
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