Delaware Sen. Joe Biden has been speaking on behalf of those who seem to have the least representation in the War on Terror.  The detainees held in the camps in Guantanamo, Cuba have become a forgotten group amidst a slew of Iraq War topics up for grabs this election season.

As far back as 2002, human rights groups have been signaling red flags on the detainee camp located a few jet miles of the coast of Florida. That year, a letter was sent by the Human Rights Watch to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld in an attempt to warn him that the growing number of detainees would eventually hurt American foreign policy further down the road According to website, www.hrw.org “As time goes by and the number of detainees grows, so does the pressure on the U.S. government to act,” said HRW’s Executive Director Kenneth Roth, on the group’s website www.hrw.org nearly 5 years ago.

Since that time, the U.S. Department of Defense has suffered embarrassment in light of charges of mistreatment and torture at the Abu Ghraib prisons in Iraq, which lead to the conviction of Pfc. Lynndie R. England on six of seven counts of conspiracy and maltreatment of prisoners in September 2005.  These events turned out to be a global public relations nightmare for the U.S. government.

News of Abu Ghraib tended to overshadow the realities of Guantanamo that include suicide attempts by the detainees and accusations of misconduct by the guards.  A number of prisoners were released in 2006 without objective questioning by the media of a potential backlash that the release could have on American national security efforts. 

Now that the 2008 presidential election campaigns are underway, the “Gitmo,” issue, as it is called, has slipped further under the rug.

Apparently, Sen. Joe Biden is one of the few presidential candidates, Democrat or Republican to re-shed light on this topic since the start of the campaign season. 

In a speech given last month at the Drake University School of Law, Biden said, “In a war where many of our detainees were not captured on a battlefield by U.S. forces and were not wearing military uniforms, habeas corpus is an indispensable safeguard against erroneous detention.”

A regular outspoken voice against the Bush administration’s Iraq War policies, Biden doesn’t fall short of tradition.  “The President has nonetheless stripped detainees of this fundamental safeguard. His efforts to deprive detainees of habeas have been repudiated three times by a Supreme Court dominated by Republican nominees. 

As a result, nations around the world view Guantanamo not as a facility necessitated by the war on terror, but as a symbol of American disregard for the rule of law,” said Biden.

The issue of rights for those held in the camps has been the subject of policy debates in Washington for years now. One side argues that as potential threats to our country, the detainees should not be granted the same judicial rights as an American citizen accused of a criminal act . Vice President Dick Cheney has stood firm on defending the use certain tactics of intimidation in order to retain information that may be vital to American national security.

In 2002, The White House stated, “The United States is treating and will continue to treat all of the individuals detained at Guantanamo humanely and, to the extent appropriate and consistent with military necessity, in a manner consistent with the principles of the Third Geneva Convention of 1949.”

The White House would later say that not all of the detainees are treated alike.  “The President has determined that the Geneva Convention applies to the Taliban detainees, but not to the al-Qaida detainees. Al-Qaida is not a state party to the Geneva Convention; it is a foreign terrorist group.  As such, its members are not entitled to POW status.”

To Biden, the idea of the Bush administration not doing all that it can do on this issue is an understatement.  “But perhaps most importantly, habeas corpus ensures that if the United States detains someone, it does so with full respect for the Constitution and the rule of law. The President has nonetheless stripped detainees of this fundamental safeguard,” said Biden. 

The Senator who is currently trailing in the polls for the Democratic nomination, but steadfast on this position, believes that camps and prisons like Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo are as great of a threat to the United States as any terrorist network. The Delaware leader said, “Our enemies have used it [Guantanamo] and Abu Ghraib to recruit additional terrorists. 

Biden calls for the closing of both camps, “These prisons have become symbols of American duplicity, not beacons of American justice once again, we should raze Abu Ghraib. We should not wait for another Supreme Court decision.  We should immediately move to restore habeas and, as I have said before, we should shut Guantanamo down.”