Wednesday, September 10, 2014

To be or not to be


A part of the United States. That is the question about all things Guantanamo. Where Chinese diplomats are informed they are traveling to a foreign country if they fly in from the US and crimes committes on base are handled under applicable US laws.
“If you look at the lease, it’s America as long as we want it to be America,” he says. “I’m not sure how that functionally is any different than Puerto Rico.”

In 1965, he said, the U.S. declared the base a special maritime jurisdiction and brought a Cuban to federal court in Miami for the machete killing of another non-U.S. citizen on base. For that crime, Guantánamo was subject to the prosecutorial jurisdiction of the United States. Since the Bush administration chose to imprison war-on-terror captives seized across the globe, it has sought to make sure the opposite applies.

That’s why moments before boarding a U.S. military charter to Guantánamo at Andrews Air Force Base — the place where the Pentagon parks the president’s plane, Air Force One — an airman warned two Chinese journalists that going to Guantánamo would amount to entering a foreign country, and their single-entry work visas would be invalid on their return.

They were invited by the Office of the U.S. Secretary of Defense to report on some war crimes hearings and were scheduled back a week later, on a nonstop flight.

They didn’t go.

Had they gone, they could’ve purchased a souvenir plastic cup at the commissary for $6.99 — duty free by federal code covering “articles of foreign origin” at GTMO, the military’s shorthand for the base. A study in schizophrenia, the souvenir is stamped GTMO, USA, Cuba.

It is for this base of about 6,000 residents that the U.S. military is building a $40 million undersea fiberoptic link to Florida so data can reach the Pentagon as swiftly as any office on U.S. soil.

And while there has been a continuous American presence at Guantánamo Bay since U.S. forces took it in a Spanish-American war battle in 1898, it’s technically leased territory. From Cuba, whose landlord, Fidel Castro, told the tenants to go home long ago.

The U.S. government says it’s a tenant barricaded behind a Cuban minefield and, as though to prove it, cuts a check each year for $4,085 — rent, based on a 1934 treaty made public by President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

It’s a one-way transaction. The Cuban government does not cash the checks.

Babies born to Americans at the base hospital are automatically citizens. A diplomat from the U.S. Embassy in Kingston, Jamaica, the closest to the base, periodically visits to process paperwork for Guantánamo’s American babies, says Kelly Wirfel, the Navy base public affairs officer.

But that’s not a privilege passed along to Filipino or Jamaican guest laborers who work as waitresses at the Irish Pub or clean the officers’ guest quarters. Were one to get pregnant at Guantánamo, she’d probably get a ticket home to avoid the issue of her baby’s citizenship.

Which is why nobody was willing speculate on that baby’s theoretical nationality. Would that baby be Cuban? Guantánamite? Stateless?

Guantánamo is not like Puerto Rico, says the State Department’s Bureau of Consular Affairs. It’s more like a U.S. embassy (with school, golf course, church and prison), and babies born to non-citizens at embassies aren’t entitled to citizenship, either.

And that pretty much reflects the pick-and-choose approach that’s become all the more pronounced as the war court hears pretrial motions in six death-penalty cases...

She calls it pick-and-choose patriotism.

“It’s America when the environmental protection laws prohibit us from killing an iguana or committing drunken driving,” she said.

“But it’s not America when they can get away with paying less than minimum wage” to the Jamaicans or Filipinos who clean the officers’ Guest Quarters. “It it’s not America when they want to violate American law regarding torture. And it’s not America when they avoid applying the Geneva Conventions.”
A territory of convenience. How very useful when you have something you can't do at home.

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