Back when the U.S. was saying “these are not POWs,” I felt sympathetic to that position, because legally they probably aren’t.
However, this is starting to get a little absurd; it’s been damn near two years now and these people are being held without trial or hope for any recourse. Maybe some are terrorists. Maybe some are not. Either way they’re human beings with a right to have some sort of legal status. No court has decided. There’s no indication for when the “War on terror” is supposed to end, or what end state would constitute war’s end. It would appear they could be held there for ten years, maybe the rest of their lives.
Donald Rumsfeld says his priority is to keep terrorists off the streets? Okay, TRY THEM. If they’re found guilty of being terrorists, or aiding and abetting terrorists, lock them up or hang them.
I think a civilized nation has a responsibility to err on the side of caution in dealing with the rights of individuals. When are these men going to get trials? Or if they ARE being held until war’s end, doesn’t that make them POWs?
Slight hijack, Who gave America the authority to arrest the prisonners anyways? Can’t the temp. governement in say Afghanistan demand their release or claim that they were kidnapped?
How would you try them? What evidence do you have other than they were fighting with the Taliban. Most are presumably “foreign fighters” who were assumed to be supplied with Al Queda.
So they would probably say they weren’t. Try them where? Military court martial or civilian?
The gov’t of Afghanistan probably isn’t too sympathetic to the plight of foreign fighters. The remnants of these foreign fighters are in Pakistan killing Afghanis and trying to overthrow the gov’t.
We don’t even know that these people were with the Taliban. We don’t know anything at all. They were rounded up just to make it look like the Bushies were filling cages with terrorists. These people are being held without any recourse to an attorney, without charges and without any contact with family. Death row inmates get better treatment than that and these guys haven’t even been convicted of anything. The Guantanamo situation is despicible and it will probably get worse. The Bushies want to turn it into a death camp with secret “trials” followed by executions. It’s sickening.
This is a non issue. I’m sure they will be dealt with when the time is right. As long as the war is currently ongoing, I don’t see how the USA is under any obligation or rush to deal with these people. The enemy has not capitulated, and therefore it’s no big deal if no action has been taken yet in regards to these illegal combatents .
They are being held in a warm tropical climate, under humane conditions. They are being fed. They are allowed religious freedom. They receive better health care than many American citizens do. I don’t really see any problem here. I would argue that they receive too many benefits and freedoms. Freedoms which would not be rewarded US soldiers, had the situation been reversed.
And as for the children, according to that link provided, one of them killed an American sergeant with a grenade. In wartime situations, age hardly matters. Kids are often more fanatical soldiers than the adults are. An AK47 can be just as deadly in the hands of a 15 year old as in the hands of a person twice that age.
Should we perhaps just simply release these people, so that they may live to kill American soldiers another day ?
When they receive their trials, I have faith that they will receive a fair and just judgement. Perhaps a few will be set free, perhaps a few will receive lengthy sentences, and perhaps a few will be executed.
Rumsfeld says they will not be released until the WoT is over. What would consist of it being over? No-one will say.
One of the Ausrtalians there, for instance, joined the Taliban when they were fighting the Russians, and later when they were effectively the government of the country. There is no contention that he fought or threatened the West in any way.
But there is no avenue to even investigate his case, let lone let him out. So he rots there for an indefinite period for no known reason. He doesn’t even know where he is. Kafka would be proud.
Well logically they get released when the political value of releasing them outweighs the poitical vaue of keepng them - if Bush had a legal case against them, there’s too much political value to not bring the cases, the US public would love some convicted ‘terrorists’. But he doesn’t.
So . . it can only be, imho, a self-serving, party political ploy that plays well to important elements within the GOP.
Someone suggested that they’re kind of trophies from an African safari, who knows how Bush thinks . . .
Well there we have it - proof positive America IS the land of the free.
'Cos anybody else gets locked up.
Would the term Gulag offend anybody?
Transporting somebody half way round the world and locking them up in a purposley created legal no-mans land without a trial (maybe they will get some sham trial in the future) is not how our laws work. Don’t people realise this is the thin end of the wedge?
First its “we KNOW these people are terrorists so we have to lock them up to protect everybody” … how about if the NYPD just decided to cruise through Harlem and lock up a few suspicious looking characters “to protect everybody”
If we have proof against these people THEN try them … if you have no proof and after 2 years interrogation you still have no proof then what do we do just wait til they die because thats politically convenient?
As I said if it looks like a Gulag and sounds like a Gulag …
This is supposed to be Great Debates, not Disengenuous Debates.
Stating that Gitmo is a Gulag is an outright falsehood, lacking any basis in facts whatsoever.
Gulags are forced labor camps, where the prisoners endured extreme hardships. One can hardly say that Gitmo meets these criteria.
A snippet from:http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/archives/gula.html Conditions in the camps were extremely harsh. Prisoners received inadequate food rations and insufficient clothing, which made it difficult to endure the severe weather and the long working hours; sometimes the inmates were physically abused by camp guards. As a result, the death rate from exhaustion and disease in the camps was high.
When Gitmo prisoners are dropping dead like flies because of malnutritio, abuse and torture, I’ll buy the argument that Gitmo can be likened to a Gulag. Until then, the comparison is absolute hogwash.
To all those who think things are just fine at Guantanamo:
How come this American Taliban (John Walker Linhd - or whatever his name was) got a trial?
Was he treated as a unlawful fighter also? Or was he a little bit less unlawful so he got a different treatment?
Or maybe the whole issue has nothing to do with law and justice?
Exactly. And the USA like all western civilization is based on the premise of human rights and due process of law. What the USA is doing in Guantanamo goes against everything the USA stands for and is a shame and a disgrace. Not even during the paranoia of the cold war did the US government trample over judicial guarantees like this. This is a very dark page in US history.
There is no such legal entity as an “illegal combatant”. These men are either foreign criminals and thus subject to extradition for crimes committed on US soil or they are Prisoners of War.
By not even providing a “competent tribunal” to assess whether or not they are PoW’s, the US is in breach of the [url=]Geneva Convention relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War. The GC was designed specifically so thatno combatant ever fell into the legal black hole created by the current US administration.
Read it through for yourself. It is perfectly clear that any such loophole could just as easily be applied to eg. Allied Special Forces and the like. Camp Delta represents a blatant violation the GC.
I don’t care who thay are or what they did, they should be tried NOW. Anything else is, well, Un-American. If we’re going to go on and on about how America is so great and “they hate our freedom”, then we should walk the walk and deal with these prisoners in the fair and democratic way we so often crow about. We’re not showing the world anything except that we can be just as medevial as any third-word country. If they are indeed Al Queda or something, sure, punish them to the fullest extent of the law.
My tinfoil hat side tells me that these people aren’t just being held because of their affiliation with terrorist groups, but that they know some things that the US doesn’t want the world to know…