That doesn’t erase the torture that happened earlier.
From the ACLU:
The suicides and hunger strikes and alleged mistreatment of the prisoners’ Qur’ans lead me to believe that the conditions are not good and the prisoners are being mistreated – mistreated enough to kill themselves. Part of the mistreatment is their indefinite detention, which is inhumane. Why else do you think they’re starving themselves?
How many gitmo releasees have turned to terrorism? What percentage is that of the total number released? How many innocent people have they killed?
Perhaps that’s why those being held should be tried and perhaps that’s why human rights abuses at Gitmo should be investigated and if necessary those responsible held unaccountable. That’s how such things are properly handled.
The results of their inspections: opposition to force-feeding, and criticism of their prolonged detention.
Does it matter? There’s always a risk, when releasing prisoners who have been tried and served their time, of a relapse back into crime. We can’t just keep them there forever. This also applies to Gitmo prisoners.
My honest opinion is that we should release those we can’t convict even knowing they’ll be pissed enough to seek vengeance upon us. We deserve it, so if it puts Americans in danger, we brought it on ourselves
Release them where? The US has a hard time getting rid of some guys because other countries don’t want them or the countries only want them to do more bad things to them.
Like, the Uighurs that it took forever to release: China would have gladly taken them years ago. Should we have just sent them to China?
:rolleyes:
It’s not that we deserve to be attacked, or even that the detainees deserve to be freed. Probably a lot of them don’t deserve to be freed, and some will go on to commit all sorts of trouble in the future.
The thing is, whether the prisoners deserve freedom, or jail, or death, free people deserve to have a government that doesn’t have the power to arbitrarily imprison or execute people without due process. Yeah, yeah, soldiers don’t need a warrant before shooting back at the bad guys. Except these guys aren’t shooting at our soldiers, they’re prisoners. They are not currently dangerous, because they are captured.
If the argument is that these are enemies who will go back to fight us in the future, by all means declare them to be prisoners of war who can be released when the war is over, and if that day never comes, well, there you go. Oh, they aren’t prisoners of war, but are common criminals? Then we try them as common criminals and sentence them as common criminals. I mean, if they’re such dangerous people they must have done something against some law or another?
If we declare them POWs they can be held indefinitely simply for being enemy fighters even if they never so much as picked up a rifle, they don’t require any sort of trial, merely a hearing to determine whether they are, in fact, enemy fighters rather than some guy who got put on a plane by mistake. That’s the whole fucking point of having POW status, you don’t need to hold a trial to keep your Nazi soldiers in a prison camp, the mere fact that they are German soldiers and you’ve captured them lets you keep them imprisoned even if they never shot anybody.
The real reason the remaining Gitmo prisoners can’t be tried is that there isn’t enough evidence against them for the government to risk giving them a trial where they’re likely be acquitted. We don’t want to risk acquitting any of them, we can’t call them POWs without embarrassing ourselves, and so we have indefinite detention without trial.
That’s, you know, tyranny.
It does matter in so far as specific claims have been made.
The DoD has claimed that it has evidence of 18 out of over 550 people released (~3%) having being directly involved in terrorism, though it’s unclear what exactly is meant by this as this in fact may only involve making statements against the United States. In total the DoD has claimed that 43 (~8%) could plausibly be involved in terrorism-related activity.
As far as I’m aware there has only been 1 single released detainee (~0.2%) who has unambiguously been involved in terrorism and has killed innocent people - a Kuwati former detainee who blew himself up in Iraq killing 13 Iraqi policemen.
The Danish former detainee who was killed in Syria was in fact fighting in an uprising against the Assad government, which is supported by the US.
Here’s the detainees Gitmo File through 2004. Basically, it states he was an al qaeda soldier. Not a terrorist (obviously a member of al qaeda), but more of a classic soldier. There’s no doubt somebody like that can legally be detained w/o committing a crime. That’s why no charge, that’s why no trial. Detained during a war he was apart of.
So why not release? At some point he was deemed no longer a threat to the US. Since he’s no longer a threat he has been cleared for release. Except his home country is Yemen. At one point Yemen would have taken them if we also threw in $200 million. We balked. Yemen won’t allow Yemens to be released to other countries. Now there’s a civil war going and a branch of al qaeda is involved. Ect. Ect. Basically, a political mess. However, new government leaders will eventually work out a deal, but it will just have taken many many years too long. And this guy literally suffers for it.
None at all. All blame lies with those who tortured the innocent until they snapped, not those who think that innocent torture victims should be freed despite the risk that their suffering made them unstable.
Are you rolling your eyes at me? The guy who said Guantanamo ought to be closed?
It’s clear that Guantanamo is going to among the dark periods in our history, just like Japanese internment camps. But it is just a plain fact that we can’t just drop off some prisoners there in other countries, because other countries don’t want these people. We can’t force them onto another country, which is another shameful aspect of this saga, in that we can’t even figure out what to do with people who don’t seem to have any reason to be tried in court nor be held as a POW.
So, there just aren’t easy answers like, “We just shouldn’t keep them anymore.” That’s a proposal to roll one’s eyes at, because that pithy thought just isn’t realistic.
I was eyerolling at this:
One answer might be to respond to this charge: “brutal and inhumane conditions of the prison, the mistreatment of the prisoners”
If you can’t charge them with anything after ten friggin years, at least give them a pool and a lounger.
For the third time, where? It certainly isn’t going to be in the US, because the US Congress doesn’t even want these guys in a friggin’ Supermax prison. The idea that they could be released into American cities is nonsense, fantasyland, coo-coo for Cocoa Puffs, nutty, unbelievable, laughable.
Interesting, thanks. The “where do we release the prisoners” problem is more complicated than I thought. For the Yemeni prisoners cleared to go: we could probably release them in Yemen IF we also give the country money. This money would be used for the implementation of a rehabilitation program for the prisoners, though there’s no guarantee it WOULD be used for that. Also Yemen has a shaky history with such programs, and there’s also no guarantee the prisoners would be treated any better than we treat them now, and no guarantee they wouldn’t join up with al-Qaeda in anger at our mistreatment of them. AND, as you pointed out, the money talks failed before.
Or we keep doing what we’re doing until Yemen changes its mind. Which just doesn’t seem tenable. I say we bite the bullet and start talking $$$ again with Yemen.
Hasn’t Obama been planning to open a neo-Guantanamo in Illinois? He would be keeping his promise of closing Gitmo. But it would be by transferring the prisoners stateside, to resume their indefinite detention.
But I agree: the “where” question is big.
There isn’t really any politically viable solution for dealing with most of the remaining detainees. I think we have something like 170 left, and I think I’ve heard maybe 15 we could probably convict of crimes. However, to convict them of crimes we’d have to have trials/military commissions, and apparently there are various reasons the government does not want to do that for the 15 or so we would probably convict.
You can take your pick from many reasons: it would expose activities the government does not want exposed, it would require intelligence to be used in the defense or prosecution the government does not want used, it would give the detainee a public soapbox to highlight/claim abuse at Gitmo and embarrass the government etc.
Then I think there are some 34-40 that we consider, based on whatever intelligence, to be legitimately bad guys who would be very dangerous if they were released. However, we have no evidence against them that could get them convicted in any court we’d put together. If they were incarcerated criminals in the United States “they’re too dangerous to release” would not be good enough, but that’s not their situation and that means dispensing with them isn’t so clear cut or easy.
Then the rest could basically be released at any time if: congress approved funds for transferring them out of Gitmo to another country (it won’t), if congress approved a program to allow them to live in the United States (it won’t), if some other country offered to pay these costs and come get them (so far there isn’t a lot of that available either), or if we could find some way to just “let” them escape.
Based on congress’s legislative power Obama’s hands are tied in many ways. And not just by the “intransigent Republicans” there have been some votes quashing various attempts to clean up this Gitmo mess where over 90 Senators have voted against anything that would result in any prisoners being released. If this base was located somewhere else, the President as Commander in Chief could order that “a section of the fence be taken down for maintenance” and then could order all the cells be opened and let nature take its course. But Gitmo is surrounded entirely by either Cuba or the Caribbean Sea, and it would cause an international incident if these guys just walked into Cuba and they obviously can’t go into the Caribbean. If this was some base in Afghanistan or something they could probably roll out and eventually find their way back to some corner of the world where they’d want to be. That option isn’t really on the table though because of the location they happen to be at right now.
Oh and on the “let them escape” tactic Cuba sort of maintains a fence line there too and god knows what they’d do when these guys started trying to go through it.
If we cannot repatriate them to the country where we nabbed them, then we release them into the US with an apology and full citizenship. We screwed up, we deserve the consequences
Not sure why you were rolling your eyes at me since you seem to agree that keeping them in limbo does a disservice to the US system of justice. As for the above, I really think that is something we should be prepared to accept, and use in PR, as a demonstration of how the US has changed.
So what if some of them are going to be acquitted? To me, that is neither a concern nor an undesirable result. If people cannot be convicted, they deserve to go free. I’d even have the government make a public apology along with restitution to those whom we’ve held without trial or charge for these last 11 years. The problem isn’t that we have a lot of terrorists sitting around that we can’t convict, the problem is that the Bush Administration basically went into Iraq and Afghanistan and told people “Give us your terrorists and we’ll give you money!” with the end result being that people turned on neighbors, on strangers, and on their enemies. They reported them as “terrorists” and without due process, many were rounded up without trial or representation and sent to Guantanamo.
Of the hundreds of people once held there, less than half remain. Of the ones who left, most were released or repatriated. Even our own government knows that less than half of the people there were innocent, and still this travesty of a torture site remains because you have Congressmen who are shitheads.
If we cannot find countries to take these people in, we deserve to let them live their lives out in the US with a full pardon and full citizenship, and the resources to sue the living crap out of those responsible.
That will never happen. The President cannot do that unilaterally and Congress would never approve it. It’s unlikely the President would even go that far, the most he’s wanted to do is house them in a prison stateside. This is not a politically viable option (and you can’t really know why Gitmo is still there as a detention center without understanding the political reality…the rest of this is just moral assertions divorced from the real world.)