Terry Waite: Detainees deserve due process
 |  Terry Waite |
|
Story Tools
|
|  VIDEO |
 Families call for Gitmo release
|
|
(CNN) -- As five British detainees were about to be released from the U.S. naval station at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, former Beirut hostage Terry Waite said Monday the American treatment of the several hundred detainees held at the facility remind him of his own captivity.
Waite was the special envoy to the Archbishop of Canterbury when he headed to Lebanon in 1987 to win freedom for several hostages. But he was kidnapped by terrorists and spent four years in solitary confinement until his release in 1991.
He told CNN anchor Anderson Cooper that the United States cannot defeat terrorism by adopting the methods of terrorists.
WAITE: Well, what I mean by that is this -- that in the days when I was captured, I was suspected by my captors of being an agent of government. I wasn't. I was a humanitarian negotiator.
They took me, they blindfolded me, and shackled me, and kept me in detention. Whilst in detention, I was, of course, denied all human rights. I had no access to the outside world, no access to any legal representation whatsoever. I was merely held on suspicion.
In the case of those who have been detained in Guantanamo Bay, they have been detained on suspicion. They have been put into the camps, they have been denied legal representation, they have been deliberately put outside the jurisdiction of the American courts.
They have not been allowed any contact with their families, apart from minimal contact, and it's only the Red Cross. So they've been given limited access to them.
COOPER: But I should point out, sir, that they do have three meals a day. The U.S. government also says they have adequate clothing, shelter. They have reading materials, and they have the means to send and receive mail, albeit perhaps not as frequent as they would like. The conditions they are being kept in are far different from the conditions you were being kept in.
WAITE: I'm not speaking about conditions. My conditions were harsh, and I've not made a comparison between conditions. I'm talking about due process of law.
Now, I can well understand, and I have great sympathy with the fact that people are afraid of terrorism. However, you don't defeat terrorism by this particular means. You don't make a unilateral decision to make what is nothing more than a large interrogation camp outside the jurisdiction of the courts.
COOPER: But these people were combatants in a war. I mean, they were picked up for the most part on the battlefields of Afghanistan, a few places elsewhere.
I'm not quite sure -- I mean, some 10,000 people were rounded up. Ultimately, only some 650, I think, are still being kept at Guantanamo Bay. I'm not sure what status you think they should be held under.
WAITE: I mean, you raise a very interesting question of, on the so-called war on terrorism, where is the battlefield? Now, I agree, you see, it does present us with new challenges.
But if we find that the existing laws are inadequate for this new situation, then there are means whereby we can get together collectively as a group of nations and draft appropriate legislation to deal with this type problem. Not by taking this unilateral action.
Unfortunately, the rule of law and international human rights conventions have been broken. And they're there for the protection of us all, and for all our freedoms. And you undermine them, you undermine all our freedoms.
