Still Missing the Point
Discussions about Guantanamo still seem to focus on moving the prisoners to another facility. This is exactly the danger I warned about several years ago -- that focusing too much on Gitmo itself as a facility was missing the whole point. The problem was indefinite detentions without due process, not the facility per se. But since so much of the press latched onto Gitmo itself as the problem, it as allowed the administration to say that it is solving the problem by eliminating Gitmo and moving the prisoners (either to Illinois or Afghanistan, the plan keeps changing) while still clinging to the position that it should still have the power to detain people at the President's pleasure.
Dhalia Lithwick has a good article on just what a mess we have created at Gitmo. Are there potential, even past, terrorists there? Probably. But I could probably say that there are current or past criminals in any random 1000 people I might sweep off the street. That doesn't justify locking them up -- as a country, we have always said that it is better to free the innocent at the cost of potentially missing some of the guilty.
And please don't hammer me again in the comments with "there is a war on and these are just POW's." Sorry, they are nothing like traditional POW's. They were not caught on the battlefield, were not in uniform, in many cases were just turned in by other people for a bounty. I think I would accept that maybe slightly different rules apply to these folks than to a person arrested on 5th Avenue in New York, but on the other hand supporters of their detention need to admit that some extra scrutiny needs to exist vs. traditional POW rules, as in this case their very combatant status is unclear, something that was not the case in, say, with most POW's in WWII.
