Give it back to Cuba indeed.Here are some interesting facts I found on Guantanamo in an excellent book called ‘Guantanamo: What the World should Know’.

1. Cuba’s constitution adopted in 1901, included what is called the Platt Amendment, legislation which established conditions for American intervention in Cuba and gave the United States the right to maintain a military base on the island in perpetuity.

2. Persuant to the Platt Amendment America leased Guantanamo from Cuba. The lease contains several critical provisions relevant to whether US courts have jurisdiction over the base.

3. The lease gives the US ‘complete jurisdiction and control’ of this territory. In other words, the Cubans have no authority whatsoever over Guantanamo.

4. The lease can only be terminated on the mutual consent of both parties. Cuba has wanted to terminate the lease since 1959 but the US has refused to consent.

5. The lease provides for a rent, $2,000 in gold the equivalent of $4,085 a year in US dollars. Although the Cuban government has refused to accept any lease money since 1959, the US is technically in default, and has been for many years because the lease provides that the base is only to be used as a coaling station.

6. The US claims it does not have sovereignty over the Guantanamo base, but in fact it exercises all aspects of sovereignty. For all intents and purposes, Guantanamo is a colony or a territory of the United States.

7. A soldier who commits a crime at Guantanamo can be tried by a court martial in Guantanamo or can be brought to the United States and tried in a federal district court. The applicable law in Guantanamo is the federal US law.

8. Guantanamo is, according to Michael Ratner, a human rights lawyer and president of the Centre for Constitutional Rights, a ‘21st century Pentagon experiment that was, in fact, outlawed by the Geneva Conventions of 1949. It is similar in purpose to the German World War II operations that led to the ban: it is an interrogation camp, and interrogation camps ARE COMPLETELY AND FLATLY ILLEGAL’.

9.Further: ‘The detainees have no means of asserting their innocence and no means of testing their detentions in any court’.

10. ‘Guantanamo’s purpose is to break down the human personalities of the detainees in order to coerce from them whatever their captors want, to get them to confess to anything, to implicate anyone’. Again, this is according to Michael Ratner who has represented some of the detainees at Guantanamo.

I don’t think giving it back to Cuba will really solve the problem of how this place came to be what it is.

Lets land the SeeBees and salvage what we can and bulldoze the rest.  Plant somes trees and grass and paint the port facilities.

Give it back to Cuba.

Article quote: “But a third military judge, James Pohl, defied Obama’s order by scheduling a n arraignment for al-Nashiri at Guantánamo. That left the decision whether to continue to Crawford, whose delay on announcing what she would do prompted widespread concern at the Pentagon that she would refuse to follow orders and allow the court process to continue.

Last year, al-Nashiri said during a Guantánamo hearing that he confessed to helping plot the Cole bombing only because he was tortured by US interrogators. The CIA has admitted he was among terror suspects subjected to waterboarding, which simulates drowning, in 2002 and 2003 while being interrogated in secret CIA prisons.”

But there’s more,

“Bad enough that we learned last week that he had made an exception for “facilities used only to hold people on a short-term, transitory basis.”

The case involves Guantanamo detainee Binyam Mohamed, who had been a victim of extraordinary rendition and who claims he was tortured by guards in Morocco using a razor blade repeatedly on his penis.”

http://www.progressive.org/mag/wx020509.html

O-k-a-y….. what’s wrong with this picture.