Amnesty International: "Guantanamo has become the gulag of our time"

[Ghost of]

About the last point. I have no problem bringing up the ACTUAL injustices in our backyard(doesnt the plight of the INNOCENT, in certain criminal prosecutions in the US bother AI-types more than the deaths of the worst of our kind?)

But saying "of our time" pretty much eliminates rhetorical consideration of NK, China or the like. That REALLY ticks me off and it would bother me a lot LESS had she merely said there were a host of problems associated with the place.

[SnyderShrugged]

My only question is "what is the alternative to camp x-ray"?

Would they be better off as dead enemy's who can't provide intel or alive prisoners who can?

[Ghost of]

Originally posted by skin-n-vegas

My only question is "what is the alternative to camp x-ray"?

Would they be better off as dead enemy's who can't provide intel or alive prisoners who can?

Well, there's a question that some of them were caught up in sweeps/raids where 'battlefield guilt' was in doubt.

The problem is, not all of these guys are going to open their mouths(remember Johnny Spann was trying to get ACTUAL combatants to talk in Afghanistan.) So even if we were to have hearings to assign a certain status to them, will we always have proof of what they were/are or how deep into a specific organization or chain of command.

I don't think it's as clear as anyone wants to pretend.

I hardly think even our soft-headed liberal friends would, if in command, be so willing to let hundreds of potential terrorists/enemies go right back to killing.

[Ignatius J.]

Skin,

that's the easy part.

Absolutley have gitmo for enemy comabatants, but install a transparent due process.

the "We picked you up because you were arab and looked funny" thing only works so long.

Do they deserve an american trial? perhaps not, but they deserve to have someone stand in front of them and a judge to tell them why they were apprehended.

I;m even willing to make a few exceptions. If say 1 out of every ten is witheld on evidence that would endanger national security, fine. Withold the evidence and simply let us trust the government in those scenarios.

Instead what we have is a situation where no one has any ability to ask why they are being held. No one has any ability to ask who is being held. I have no idea how to answer these questions for a single person being held in gitmo. That is not acceptable. Am I just an idiot?

What standards are used to determine if someone is an enemy comabatant? Rumsfeld see,s to indicate that they are foreigners. What does that even mean? Is someone who is returning home to visit his family an enemy combatant? Do you have to fire on american troops to be a combatant? No one has any answers to these questions.

I would agree with ghost's last statement. I'm not at all suggesting we open up camp X-ray and send them all home. But we need to have some transparency. We need to have some accountability.

[Thiebear]

They deserve to have JAG tell them why their there..

I'm guessing 90% know why they are there though.

Raise your hand if you believe:

540 people don't receive legal representation and 2 years of incarceration = 180,000 people killed and 2 million fleeing.....

[Larry]

I suspect I'm one of the biggest critics of Gitmo (and others) on this board.

But I'll also point out: I do believe that the folks in our military, who are running things, are generally honest, decent people, who are haking an honest effort to Do The Right Thing in what is, let's face it, a difficult circumstance. (Although I also think those decent people are receiving a lot of pressure from the Administration to go quite a bit further than what those decent people consider to be Right.)

For example: Consider Prisoner 3.1415. Is he an Iraqi who was defending his country, or a foreign insurgent? How many man-hours do you think it would take to prove which country he's a citizen of? (Heck, we can't even prove who is or isn't a citizen of our own country.)

(And even if you can prove that he's, say, Iranian, does that make him an "unauthorised combatant"? Or is he a tourist who was visiting his great Uncle Ahmed?)

But I also believe that the alegetions and accusations will continue, untill we get some transparancy there.