Thanks for the comments, TD. I did wonder about adding something to the Post’s unnecessary proviso, along the lines of asking if it was editorial policy to state, every time a civilian court failed to convict someone, that the defense’s “version of events is impossible to verify independently” — and also to point out that, in federal courts, prisoners are also not kidnapped and held for nearly seven years before their cases are dismissed — but decided that would be an unwieldy intrusion into the flow of the article. So thanks for giving me the excuse to point it out.

And thanks also for pointing out, as should happen every day, accompanied by some sort of loud siren, that the courts have, to date, cleared 86 percent of the prisoners whose cases have been heard, and that Obama has so far released only two prisoners — and, I might add, that 21 of those 25 prisoners whose habeas petitions were successful are still held.

Many months ago, I toyed with the idea of setting up a campaigning website, “Free the Guantanamo Uighurs,” to canvas support for the release of the 17 Uighurs, and to put the spotlight on Judges Randolph and Henderson, the appeals court judges who dismissed Judge Ricardo Urbina’s order to release the Uighurs into the US last October.

The more their distressing limbo is maintained, the more I’m thinking that it really needs to be done …

The Washington Post does indeed add that zinger qualifier “of course it can’t be confirmed”… But notice what is not discussed in the WaPo article (because then, perhaps, Americans might actually not be able to deny it): Lakhdar was not merely a successful litigant before the United States Supreme Court, he is one of 25 out of 29 detainees who have had habeas corpus hearings (in American federal court, by American judges) determine that the United States simply has no legal reason to hold them. And for those who fear “liberal activist judges”, he was so found by Judge Richard Leon, a George W. Bush appointee who has given the government every possible benefit of the doubt (and is indeed the only judge to have found that there was a legal basis to hold anyone).

Despite detainees winning over 86% of their legal cases, the Obama Admin. has released a pathetic two in four months; at this rate, detainees will trickle out over the next 3 or 4 decades, making that “close GTMO in one year” promise about as empty as everything else associated with “the excuse for tyranny nebulous thing formerly known as the war on terror”.

President Obama’s rhetoric on the subject has been laudable; his actual action on the subject to date has been anything but. I recognize that there may be “pragmatic” political reasons for this, and the President may still be in his “honeymoon phase” for many people. Neither ia an excuse for we, the citizenry, to engage in the least bit of complacency in the face of an egregious ONGOING injustice being committed by our own government right in front of us.