Glad to hear Obama is planning on closing Guantanamo, but will be interested in seeing exactly how that transpires. I mean, even a totally innocent accountant will be a wild-eyed. maniac terrorist by now…and could you blame him?
Maybe invite them to the White House for dinner, give them a severance check and let them have a few virgins in the Lincoln bedroom?
Not quite sure how to release someone after that horror…have them swallow a GPS chip?
Make them free Americans but not give them a passport for 30 years?
The mind boggles.
Put them in another prison that’s not called “Guantanamo.”
Preferrably in a country that is more ironic than Cuba.
There are a lot of ways it could go. The plausible options look something like this, for each detainee:
a) Release to their home country
b) Release them to some third-party country
c) Try them in US criminal court
d) Try them in a new special tribunal
e) Send them to a different US prison abroad (e.g. Iraq/Afghanistan/Poland)
f) Attempt to detain indefinitely inside US without trial
Some detainees will no doubt get (a), (b), or ©. It is, among other things, strategically foolish to go for (d). It both fails to remedy the image problem and the ethical/legal problem. People will languish in detention for another near-decade while the new system gets challenged, and it will not be seen as legitimate anyway. Option (e) suffers from similar failings. It solves the immediate image problem, but people will pretty rapidly figure out that we’ve merely substituted one gulag for another. It also isn’t clear how long-term that solution would be, given the state of things in Iraq and Afghanistan. My guess is that a small handful of detainees for whom (a), (b), & © are not options might be sent to other military prisons until something changes, but not in any significant number. Option (f) is probably legally infeasible, suffers many of the drawbacks of (d) and (e), and Obama has explicitly ruled it out.
I think Obama will be politically and legally compelled to go with some combination of (a), (b), & ©. I also think that, security-wise, it’s sort of a clusterfuck no matter what. But keep in mind that lots of people who are intimately angry at the US do not become terrorists. Plenty of men have been wrongly imprisoned for decades because of the intentional or negiigent acts of prosecutors/police, and they tend to be angry, but happy for their freedom. Civilian prisons are not Gitmo, but they’re no cakewalk either.
The calculus has to be that even if we release a lot of potential terrorists–either because we’ve radicalized them or because they wanted to harm us to begin with–the departure from American principles that Guantanamo represents is a greater threat to our security than releasing the inmates. The War on Terror is as much about hearts and minds as anything else (as Iraq/Abu Ghraib has clearly shown), and ultimately about the perception of the US among potential jihadists. Maybe it’s too late to unspill that milk, but I think that far more than a few hundred people are radicalized by the ongoing US detention of men–some of whom are likely innocent–without trial.
That would qualify as change.
What about the 17 Uighur detainees?
a) home country (China) is likely to torture or execute them
b) no third party country wants them (it would irritate China)
c) The US has pretty much admitted that they have committed no crime
d) see above
e) and f) no Justice with either of these!
Indeed.
Perhaps we will persuade a third-party country to take them. The right thing to do would be to parole them in the US until we find a country that will take them. That might even allow them to claim asylum, which would have lower political consequences than simply giving them US citizenship.
Trouble is, I can visualize China (via some back-door diplomacy), saying to the potential third party country in effect:
“That’s a lovely currency you’ve got there. It’d be a shame if it got… broken.”
Granted, no one wants to make an enemy of China, but China won’t be wielding that kind of power for the next few years while it deals with its own economic issues. And I don’t think China is going to get all belligerent over 17 Uighurs, despite their rhetoric. So I’m still holding out some hope that they will get placed somewhere.
Incidentally, when I was in China, we used to pretend to be Uighurs just to see how long we could get away with it. The accent was pretty easy, and many people didn’t know what Uighur-accented Mandarin was supposed to sound like anyway. I didn’t realize until years later that this could have gotten me into some trouble.
You may be right, but I don’t really want my government to take the risk. Selfish, I know.
Wait, you’re so scared of China’s reaction that you’d keep innocent people in jail without charges?
You honestly, seriously, think China would destroy their economy over 17 separatists? Knowing that China’s political stability depends on their ability to deliver economic growth to the masses, and if China’s economy stumbles there are likely to be communist party officials swinging from lampposts all over China?
We might be talking past each other at the moment - I was talking about sending them to a 3rd country such as Canada.
Canada did not put the innocent people in Gitmo in the first place. I don’t see why a third country should have to bear any risk at all to help get them out.
My preference would be that the US Government gives each of them a green card, $1,000,000 and a nice new hat, and sets them up in Florida somewhere. (of course, they might also expect to be watched carefully as well)
ETA: China could probably seriously damage Canada’s economy without even breaking a sweat.
Another part of the problem is that these some of these people are guilty of fighting against the U.S., but we don’t have the evidence that will stand up in court. Remember that most of these people are POWs, and you don’t need the same standards of evidence and doubt to put theim prison. If we have a guy that is legitimately incarcerated, I don’t want to give him 1 million and let him loose in the U.S.
The united states government has spent years arguing that they aren’t POWs, and that the only evidence needed is their say-so.
http://archives.cnn.com/2002/US/01/22/ret.guantanamo.detainees/index.html
Do I look like the United States government?
So basically you don’t even have faked evidence but just **know **that they are guilty? :smack:
What in the world are you talking about?
All of the Guantanamo detainees are completely innocent of any wrongdoing.
Yep.
BZZZZZT! Nobody has come close to saying that.
SOME may be bad, bad, people who were (and will continue be) guilty of trying to harm the United States.
SOME are undoubtedly innocent (some of these have been quietly let go already)
In fact, in regards to the 17 Chinese Muslims currently being held there - The US Government themselves admits that they have nothing to hold them on. Yet they remain there.
Bolding mine
That’s the problem. How do we know if a person has been legitimately incarcerated or not? The prisoners have not had access to the normal channels of legal representation to determine guilt or innocence.
I agree though that just opening the gates and saying “bye, be good, write soon” might not be a great idea.
can you provide more info? I haven’t heard anything about this.