“The number of ‘combatants’ actually captured by American forces during the Afghanistan war that ended up at Guantanamo Bay is… wait for it… one.”

I need to go and look at the report again. I take it that doesn’t include Afghans, as, time and again, they were woken up in the middle of the night because some helpful snitch or petty warlord or other chancer had explained to Special Forces or the CIA that the man down the road who appeared to be a deaf and penniless farmer was, in fact, a senior official in the Taliban government — or variations thereof, over and over and over again.

Enough of the “captured on the battlefield” or “prisoner of war” canard: these men at GTMO are and were by and large wrong-place-wrong-time men handed over for bounties; once in a while, perhaps someone so handed over might have been Taliban, or might have had some tenuous ties to al Qaeda, but by and large, even this isn’t true. There may well be terrorists at GTMO, but it seems this was as much a function of random luck as by any design.

The facts of this travesty are such that even in courts with a record of absolute deference to the government are holding in favor of detainees at a rate of over 85%… there is simply no there there, and by the time President Obama (habby birthday, Barack,btw) breaks his promise to close GTMO by next January 20th, these 85% innocent men will have been wrongfully and pointlessly held for over eight years.

Your final comment: “It is not a human rights violation to hold combatants until the end of a conflict,” shows your most serious misconception.

Yes, the USA would have been entitled to hold actual combatants, until the end of the conflict. But, if the Bush administration had not chosen to violate its obligations under the Geneva Convention, it would have used the Geneva Conventions’ definition of “combatant”. That definition is very different from the definition the Bush administration made up from whole cloth.

Here is one important difference. Using the Geneva Conventions’ definition former soldiers, demobilized before the conflict began, are civilians. Using the Bush administration definition individuals some Afghan captives were classified as “enemy combatants” solely because they fought against Afghanistan’s Soviet invaders during the 1980s. Some of the non-Afghan captives were classified as “enemy combatants” not because they engaged in hostilities in Afghanistan, but because they had once been drafted back home. Several captives were classified as “enemy combatants” because they served during the 1991 Gulf War, even though they served on our side.

Over 500 captives have been repatriated. Nevertheless Guantanamo continues to contain individuals who would have been classified as civilians if the USA had complied with the Geneva Conventions.

Of the remainder, only a couple of dozen were bona fide terrorists.

No offense, but I think your post contains a couple of misconceptions. The first three captives Andy wrote about, Alla Ali Bin Ali Ahmed, Yasim Basardah, and Ayman Batarfi are all Yemenis. Yemen says they want all the Yemenis returned. The USA won’t return them because American counter-terrorism analysts aren’t satisfied that Yemen will impose draconian enough security measures on the returned Yemenis. Some Yemenis convicted of a role in USS Cole bombing escaped from Yemeni custody.

On the other hand, there were three Yemenis who were in CIA custody. I read about them about a year after they had been repatriated to Yemen, where they were sent directly to prison. The article quoted a Yemeni official who said the three would be tried — just as soon as the USA supplied the evidence.

Well, I think we know now that the USA had no evidence against most of the captives it held in extrajudicial detention. I don’t think anyone can blame Yemen for declining to agree to the security measures the USA is trying to insist on — when the USA can’t supply any evidence.

The non-Yemenis Andy mentioned can’t be repatriated to their country of citizenship without breaking international provisions the USA is a signatory to. Those international agreement proscribe repatriation when doing so puts the individual at risk.

The problem is you can’t repatriate a person to another country without that country’s consent. Goes back to the original Vienna Conventions and the Laws of Nations that essentially make each State sovereign and equal.

To force a country to take a former detainee back would infringe on that state’s sovereignty. Also, it is a violation of human rights law if we suspected that a detainee would be tortured or killed upon release in another country and released them anyway.

It is not a human rights violation to hold combatants until the end of a conflict. That is a basic tenet of the Law of War. (Prior to that rule it was common to either execute POWs or make them slaves). e.g. Rome.

To once again pronounce these acts and policies of the past AND PRESENT maladministrations appalling, reprehensible, and unconscionable seems far too feeble, and worn out to boot.

It’s punishment that is beyond “cruel”, and it OUGHT to be “unusual”– but our barbaric federal government’s custom has eliminated the latter possibility.

No Pharoah of old could be more righteously entreated to “let my people go!” than the charlatan occupying the Oval Office. Apparently inviting affected parties over to hoist a brewski and sort things out is not a universal resolution for an awkward moment.

We are governed by sociopaths and narcissists.

“I wonder why more people aren’t reading this.”

me too, friend.

could it be that most believes 0 has shut this limbo down?

abuelo wrote:

Thanks Andy. Keep up your great work. Some stories here on commondreams get 60, 70 comments. I wonder why more people aren’t reading this. And also, what does this mean?

I read lots of your stories on your website, and talk to people about them, or try to.