PAPER TRAIL

Wednesday, November 12, 2008 3:06 PM

Human Rights Groups Recommend '9/11 Commission' For Guantánamo

By AMY HARDER

As Barack Obama reportedly considers closing the Guantanamo Bay prison, a report [PDF] released today by the University of California, Berkeley, in association with the New York-based Center for Constitutional Rights, urges the president-elect to appoint a commission charged with examining the treatment of detainees at Guantanamo, Afghanistan and other locations since Sept. 11.

Researchers interviewed more than 60 former detainees and 50 "key informants," such as government officials and attorneys representing the detainees. The report found "serious flaws" in the system President Bush set up to detain, interrogate and release suspected members of the Taliban and al-Qaida.

In a conference call today with reporters, the report's authors stressed that setting up a commission -- similar to the one that investigated the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 -- should be the first step for the Obama administration. Laurel Fletcher, director of the International Human Rights Law Clinic at UC Berkeley School of Law, emphasized the global influence this commission could have.

Establishing the commission right away would "create a very strong symbolic message to the American public and to our international community that the Obama administration is going to turn the page on this dark chapter and is willing to take a critical look at the last eight years about what went wrong and what went right," Fletcher said.

Fletcher, along with Eric Stover, director of UC Berkeley's Human Rights Center, and Vincent Warren, executive director of the Center for Constitutional Rights, insisted that the camp should be closed immediately, but that closing it is not enough. "There's a larger political question here," Warren said. "It's important that the Obama administration look to the findings in this report to help guide its policy on what the next steps are."

Stover said the commission would include a wide range of experts on subjects such as constitutional and military law, public health and medicine. Who those experts should be, and how many of them should be selected, is for the Obama administration to decide, Stover said.

The group also wholeheartedly supports employing executive orders to end the use of torture in interrogation practices, a step that Rep. Rush Holt, D-N.J., who chairs the Select Intelligence Oversight Panel, is advocating.