Guiltless in Gitmo?

Julian Sanchez | February 8, 2006

If accurate, this National Journal cover story is scandalous. Stuart Taylor's Journal column sums up the major points:

• A high percentage, perhaps the majority, of the 500-odd men now held at Guantanamo were not captured on any battlefield, let alone on "the battlefield in Afghanistan" (as Bush asserted) while "trying to kill American forces" (as [press secretary Scott] McClellan claimed).
• Fewer than 20 percent of the Guantanamo detainees, the best available evidence suggests, have ever been Qaeda members.
• Many scores, and perhaps hundreds, of the detainees were not even Taliban foot soldiers, let alone Qaeda terrorists. They were innocent, wrongly seized noncombatants with no intention of joining the Qaeda campaign to murder Americans.
• The majority were not captured by U.S. forces but rather handed over by reward-seeking Pakistanis and Afghan warlords and by villagers of highly doubtful reliability.

Comments

Warren|2.8.06 @ 1:42PM|#

Is this news? I've been reading and seeing this for years already.

|2.8.06 @ 1:48PM|#

I agree with Warren.

|2.8.06 @ 1:50PM|#

I agree with Warren, and I meet new people all the time who seem to have never heard anything about this.

|2.8.06 @ 2:00PM|#

Your honor, when my client was caught with the 40 pounds of marijuana he had found, he was actually on his way to the police station to turn it in to them, as any good citizen would...

|2.8.06 @ 2:04PM|#

... Therefore, your honor, we should be able to hold him in jail indefinitely and not charge him with anything.

|2.8.06 @ 2:06PM|#

Your honor, the defendant has been in jail for so long that he's developed a seething resentment of society. If allowed to set foot in a courtroom with civilians there's no telling what he might do to them!

|2.8.06 @ 2:06PM|#

Yes it's from the military, but this very well-written and mostly non-simplistic account of Gitmo prisoners' statements gives a good nuanced middle ground to the origin of how many got to Afghanistan.

http://usacac.leavenworth.army.mil/CAC/milreview/download/English/JulAug05/curcio.pdf

|2.8.06 @ 2:12PM|#

Perhaps Bush should have them all summarily executed...

|2.8.06 @ 2:39PM|#

It would have been worse with Kerry.

|2.8.06 @ 2:56PM|#

I had to post a link to this somewhere on H&R, and this thread gets it: The Disappearing Civil Liberties Mug

|2.8.06 @ 3:26PM|#

Douglas Fletcher gets the Instapundit Conservatarian of the week prize with that gem!

|2.8.06 @ 3:49PM|#

Shhh...be quiet now chilluns', nothing to see here, move along, it'll all be over soon, pay no attention the man behind the curtain, conservatives are your friends...we are from the government and we are here to help you...

just keep quiet a little bit longer and it'll all be over, and it'll be painless, we promise.

|2.8.06 @ 3:54PM|#

I'd get mad, but if did that everytime I heard something like this (namely, every time I read Hit and Run) I would fucking explode.

My sympathy to these poor souls.

Hume's Ghost|2.8.06 @ 4:56PM|#

This was the picture that Erik Saar painted in Inside the Wire. What is even more troubling if true is the revelation that the administration knows that the majority of detainees at Abu Ghraib have no intelligence value or are not terrorists, but is deliberately releasing them slowly and not all at once as to avoid the negative pr that would result.

|2.8.06 @ 5:24PM|#

We can't let the defendant see the evidence, your honor. Why, if we did that, there's no telling *who* we'd find not guilty!

|2.8.06 @ 6:47PM|#

If accurate

"Well then...never mind."

Larry A|2.8.06 @ 11:40PM|#

"If you haven't done anything wrong, you don't have anything to worry about."

|2.8.06 @ 11:44PM|#

"He might not have been guilty of that, but he was guilty of somethin'."

|2.9.06 @ 1:01AM|#

Douglas Fletcher gets the Instapundit Conservatarian of the week prize

Whatever that is. I'm surely a geezer around here because apparently none you recognized my little theft from an old Cheech and Chong routine.

|2.9.06 @ 10:17AM|#

Dave's not here.