Should cleared captives get compensation from the U.S.?
MIAMI— Retired U.S. Supreme Court justice John Paul Stevens shattered the taboo on talking about reparations for Guantanamo captives this week in a speech that said some of the nearly 800 men and boys held at the Pentagon’s prison camps in Cuba may be entitled to compensation, like Japanese-Americans who were interned during the Second World War.
“I by no means suggest that every Guantanamo detainee, such as those who have been convicted by a military commission, is entitled to compensation,” he said in prepared remarks for a meeting of the nonprofit Lawyers for Civil Justice group. “But detainees who have been deemed not to be a security threat to the United States and have thereafter remained in custody for years are differently situated.”
In doing so, the 95-year-old justice who was appointed by Gerald Ford, retired in 2010 and replaced by Elena Kagan, stepped into an ongoing tug-of-war between the White House and Congress about what to do with the last122 captives at Guantanamo — 57 of them approved for release, with host country security assurances.
Many of them are Yemeni, and many of them were provisionally approved for transfer by Bush administration review boards and then again by a 2009 task force set up by U.S. President Barack Obama. Neither administration would repatriate them, citing insecurity in their country.
The Obama administration, however, has been trying to fashion individual resettlement deals for some of them in other countries on a case-bycase basis.
But Congress has made that increasingly difficult. Successive legislation has forbidden the transfer of detainees to the United States for any reason, and imposed other restrictions.
At the White House, spokesman Josh Earnest lamented congressional “barriers” to Obama’s goal of closing the detention centre, calling the prison “not consistent with the wise use of our government resources” and “counterproductive.”
He did not, however, offer an opinion on the idea of reparations.
Afew former detainees have tried to sue the United States for compensation, using different legal theories. But U.S. government lawyers have successfully thwarted having the cases heard. In 2010, Britain paid undisclosed millions in compensation to former Guantanamo prisoners who accused the British government of complicity in their U.S. detention.
Stevens, a U.S. navy veteran of the Second World War, called the detention centre a “wasteful extravagance” that should be closed “as promptly as possible.” He adopted a calculus that currently estimates it costs $3 million a year to keep a single detainee at Guantanamo — a formula the commander of the U.S. Southern Command, Marine Gen. John Kelly, disputed a year ago in sworn testimony.
Stevens’ talk, which was posted on the U.S. Supreme Court website, invoked president Franklin Roosevelt’s decision to intern thousands of Japanese-Americans during the Second World War, and noted that the United States twice paid reparations — $37 million in1948 and $1.2 billion in 1988.
He also noted that the Bush administration released the overwhelming majority of detainees released from the prison camps opened in Cuba.