The Gitmo Project

I would like to thank Captain Ed for the opportunity to be involved in his blogswarm. I read one section of these documents and learned a number of things about the detainees as well as about al-Quaeda and the Taliban. If my sample can be taken as representative then:
1. Everyone in Gitmo is apparently a driver or cook. There are no actual Taliban nor al-Quaeda fighters there. So clearly we let all the ones with the guns and the hostile intent get away.
2. No one ever joins the Taliban or al-Quaeda voluntarily. It operates entirely by impressment of innocent drivers and cooks.
3. Lots and lots of people from arab countries travel to the northern border of Pakistan with no intent whatever to ever cross in to Afghanistan. That only ever occurs by accident and besides no one really knows where the border is up there.
4. Muslim brotherhood only extends to other racial groups in times of peace. The rest of the time muslims of one race will enthusiastically deliver muslims of other races over to the local authorities who will, in turn, enthusiastically torture same and force confessions out of them.

The big problem with these documents is that they are mostly the detainee's statements. Overall the experience I would compare to reading only the defense arguments in a court case. If you only read defense arguments you are likely to decide that most defendants are innocent. Only some of those detainees are foolish or ignorant enough to incriminate themselves. The remainder at least seem to know what to deny.

Nevertheless, 9 out of 10 of the cases I studied were of a sort that I am confident in saying that the US was wholly within its rights to detain them as enemy combatants at the time of capture. Whether they continue to represent a danger is a more difficult subject and I would not like to have to give an assessment of that without seeing the equivalent of the case for the prosecution.

We mustn't forget is that these are not domestic civilian criminal cases. Detention of enemy combatants is not criminal justice. The rules are different and the purpose is different. The standards for releasing them have to be different as a consequence.

One last thought: there is a recurring theme in these cases that could go unnoticed, but it is along the lines of "whatever you do don't turn me back over to the Pakistani/Iranian/Algerian authorities. You don't understand what they're like." What do you think that could mean?