By KAREN LANGLEY
Years of crusading against detainee torture earned the dean of Pierce Law a prime view in the Oval Office yesterday as President Barack Obama signed an order closing the U. S. detention center in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
John Hutson, the Navy’s top uniformed lawyer until his 2000 retirement, stood with other retired generals and admirals who have campaigned against abuses at the detention center as Obama signed his first executive order to shutter the camp within one year.
“The president clearly gets it,” said Hutson, who became dean of Franklin Pierce Law Center in Concord after his retirement from the Navy. “We’ve been struggling with these issues for so many years, and now, in his second day in office, he essentially fixes the problem.”
Obama also signed an order establishing a task force to determine what to do with the 245 detainees still held at Guantanamo. The orders will strengthen national security, Hutson said, by dampening the grudges Guantanamo had fostered among enemies of the United States.
The camp “energizes our enemies and gives them a passion to fight,” he said. “It makes us less safe, not more.”
Concord resident Rob Kirsch, an attorney who has represented six Guantanamo detainees since 2004, said a snarl of public misperception about the camp has complicated its closing and necessitated the yearlong time frame.
The perception that detainees of the camp are “the worst of the worst,” Kirsch said, was misinformation spread for political purposes by officials of the Bush administration.
“Guantanamo was a mistake,” Kirsch said. “It was a mistake that has been allowed to fester, and, unfortunately, it was allowed to fester as part of a strategy to expand the scope of executive authority in our country.”
In November, a federal judge in Washington ruled five of the detainees represented by Kirsch had been held unlawfully throughout their nearly seven
-year confinement. Three of those detainees have since been returned to their homes in Bosnia, while two remain in the camp.
Kirsch and colleagues at his Boston firm are working to secure the release of the two remaining detainees and appeal the judge’s decision that a sixth detainee, Belkacem Bensayah, was held lawfully.
Although outright defenders of Guantanamo are increasingly rare, Obama’s orders were met with criticism by some who believed the president did not answer crucial questions about how and where detainees would be delivered. Like other Republicans on Capitol Hill, Sen. Judd Gregg cautioned yesterday against releasing any detainees who might endanger Americans.
“Evidence against many detainees is insufficient for conventional prosecution, but sufficient enough that releasing them into society is an unacceptable risk to our troops and citizens,” the senator said in a statement.
In July 2005, Gregg said on the Senate floor that Guantanamo Bay was an important tool that allowed the United States to garner intelligence from “very bad people from the Iraq and Afghanistan area.”
“The interrogations which occur there occur under strict regimes,” Gregg said at the time. “They are constantly monitored and meet all the necessary responsibilities of legal and humane rights.”
Yesterday’s executive orders rolled back a loosening of interrogation policy by explicitly nullifying legal opinions on the topic issued by the Department of Justice since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Lobbyists against the use of torture praised the move, but some worried that the order’s creation of a task force to consider the sufficiency of those standard techniques kept open the door to unjust treatment of prisoners.
“That is the cause of some concern,” said David Lamarre-Vincent, executive director of the New Hampshire Council of Churches. “We are urging the president to ensure whatever additional techniques of interrogation are approved are effective and available for public scrutiny.”
The task force should only approve of additional techniques that they would consent to other countries using on captured Americans, said Lamarre- Vincent, whose council is a member of the National Religious Campaign Against Torture.
About 800 men have been detained at Guantanamo since the camp opened in 2002. Most have been sent home. None of the 245 detainees still held are being held by the Department of Defense as enemy combatants.
Kirsch, the attorney who has represented detainees, said he is confident the camp will close within the year.
“My experience in the last four and a half years has demonstrated that our military is just impeccable at following orders,” he said. “The president has issued an order, and I think the military will see to it that order is carried out.”
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