Former Chief Prosecutor at Guantanamo starts campaign to shut it down

A former Chief Prosecutor at Guantanamo Bay prison has begun a campaign urging US President Barack Obama to shut the highly controversial detention centre down.

Morris Davies served 25 years in the US Air Force, and was the Chief Prosecutor for the Terrorism Trials at Guantanamo Bay for more than two years. Having had first-hand experience of the prison, he feels it is now time to shut the prison down.

"I personally charged Osama Bin Laden’s driver Salim Hamdan, Australian anathema David Hicks, and Canadian teen Omar Khadr. All three were convicted… and then they were released from Guantanamo. More than 160 men who have never been charged with any offence, much less convicted of a war crime, remain at Guantanamo with no end in sight. There is something fundamentally wrong with a system where not being charged with a war crime keeps you locked away indefinitely and a war crime conviction is your ticket home" he says.

His current campaign has nearly 63,000 signatures on Change.org and he doesn't plan to stop gathering more support. "As of April 29, 2013 – 100 of the 166 men who remain in Guantanamo are engaged in a hunger strike in protest of their indefinite detention. Twenty-one of them are being force-fed and five are hospitalised. Some of the men have been in prison for more than 11 years without charge or trial. The United States has cleared a majority of the detainees for transfer out of Guantanamo, yet they remain in custody year after year because of their citizenship and ongoing political gamesmanship in the US," he says.

"I am calling on Secretary of Defence Charles Hagel to use his authority to effect cleared transfers from Guantanamo and on President Obama to appoint an individual within the Administration to lead the effort to close Guantanamo. Obama announced on 30 April that he plans to do his part to close Guantanamo, but he has made this promise before. Now is the time to hold him to his promise and urge him to take the steps necessary to dismantle Guantanamo Bay Prison".

Davies says the US can "... never retake the legal and moral high ground" on any other country if they were treating prisoners the way the US are treating those in Guantanamo.

"We would roundly and rightly criticise that country" he adds. (NewsPoint)