The Daily Background

Associated Press:

The Pentagon called them “among the most dangerous, best-trained, vicious killers on the face of the Earth,” sweeping them up after Sept. 11 and hauling them in chains to a U.S. military prison in southeastern Cuba.

Since then, hundreds of the men have been transferred from Guantanamo Bay to other countries, many of them for “continued detention.”

And then set free.

Decisions by more than a dozen countries in the Middle East, Europe and South Asia to release the former detainees raise questions about whether they were really as dangerous as the United States claimed, or whether some of America’s staunchest allies have set terrorists and militants free.

It’s more the former than the latter. If the Administration actually considered these people dangerous, there’s no situation where they’d let go of them.

There was a time when the Pentagon admitted that probably half of the people being illegally detained at Guantanamo Bay were probably innocent and had only been picked up because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time. This included kids, almost whole families and elderly people who had been ‘picked up off the battlefield’ according to the US military. Rightttt.

Complicating the matter is that the Pentagon does not tell people who it determines are innocent that they will be let go. In some cases, they’ll hold people they’ve already decided as innocent for weeks or months.

In one case earlier this year, an individual being held at Guantanamo Bay committed suicide because thought his situation was futile. Only later did it come out that the Pentagon was procrastinating telling him that he was innocent (which he already knew), and that he would be released. He thought he had nothing to live for, so he killed himself.

Filed under: Human Rights, Z-TDB Blog