The AP has a story today about the 300 or so Guantanamo Bay Prison inmates who have been released. This prison is usually known by its military euphamism of Gitmo, where the US has detained the "worst of the worst terrorists" according to Rumsfeld and the Bush administration.
The Democrats claim that this prison along with numerous Bush policies has made us a pariah in the rest of the world and severely damaged our reputation. Republicans respond that all those people hated us already anyway, and the proper course is to fight them and ignore their protests as they are not on the side of what is right, anyway.
It appeared though that the information coming out on the fate of the released Gitmo detainees favors the Democrats view. One detainee who was returned to Afghanistan claimed to be a low level member of the Taliban who was innocent of any terrorist behavior. From the article:
"Mohammed Aman, a 49-year-old Afghan who describes himself as a former low-level member of the Taliban, said he initially wasn't worried when U.S. troops detained him.
"I was relaxed because I was innocent," he said. "I was sure I would be freed. I was always thinking that today or tomorrow I will be free."
He spent three years at Guantanamo until he was finally put on a plane at the base, blindfolded and with headphones covering his ears. When he made it back to his home in Malaik Khail, Afghanistan, villagers streamed out to greet him, many weeping."
There are similar stories with many of the 250 that AP tracked, and it raises clearly the ethics of keeping people in jail without a trial, with scanty evidence that would not hold up in court, and also being treated with torture or at the least torturous conditions.
"The Afghan government has freed every one of the more than 83 Afghans sent home. Lawmaker Sibghatullah Mujaddedi, the head of Afghanistan's reconciliation commission, said many were innocent and wound up at Guantanamo because of tribal or personal rivalries."
Can you imagine the affect on local communities where these men are now released to? It has to increase the hositility toward America, Afghanistan is our friend, not enemy.
The problem is that America has never been in this situation before, where we have a low level, seemingly never ending war that could last decades. What do you do with prisoners of war in this situation? In previous wars you could lock them up til the end of the war then when a few passed and the war was over let them go home. Now because some of them may go back and engage in new terrorist activity, and there is no clearly defined battlefield or army, taking a prisoner in this situation poses new challenges.
On the other hand, treating them like criminals in a war situation where they are not American citizens seems to deny the seriousness of what we are confronting. They are not common criminals.
In any case, there is no way we should keep those without some kind of serious tribunal or trial to determine if they are really the big terrorist fish Bush says they are. Clearly some of the Gitmo detainees are not big fish or even terrorists. To know now that we tortured innocent people like that is an outrage, totally unacceptable. It also shows how foolish and morally wrong it is to torture any of these prisoners. All we are doing is sowing seeds of hatred against us for the future, and lowering ourselves to our enemies standards. When you become what you are fighting you have lost.
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