I agree completely.

What I think public safety requires is a thorough, skeptical review of every claim that the Guantanamo intelligence team has asserted they learned from the captives. The total lack of meaningful sanity checking in the claims have seriously eroded public safety, because those claims were taken seriously, and resources were squandered, wildly.

Better late than never, all those claims that can’t withstand scrutiny should be dismissed, before they lead to the waste of more counter-terrorism resources.

This would be an instance of fundamental justice coinciding with public safety. Because 500 of the men transferred from Guantanamo remain classed as “enemy combatants”.

THIS is the reality behind Colin Powell’s long-ago warning to George Bush over Iraq: “you break it, you own it!”

The United States wronged these men, and has made it impossible for them to return home. It’s the US’s problem to fix. If that means giving them a green card, that’s the debt the US owes. Any less is a gross national dishonor.

It is really quite astonishing that it has been and is still being assumed, as if it is the normal state of affairs, that people may be imprisoned indefinitely on the grounds that they had once been accused of wrongdoing, and that the acknowledged fact of the baselessness of that accusation is not by itself sufficient grounds for setting those people free. This is very nice, isn’t it? A mere accusation has the same legally-binding effect of a trial and conviction, with the added ‘benefit’ that there is no possibility of appeal, pardon, parole, or anything else. If this continues, presumption of innocence is dead.

The Bush/Cheney unending American nightmare continues. People who have never lifted a finger against the US are loudly proclaimed to be “the worst of the worst” by VP Cheney and 8 years of their lives disappear in a US prison camp.

The word “shame” comes to mind, but there were real criminal acts committed here to tear such gaping holes in these people’s lives. Why is this tolerated in a “free” society?

CitizenLegislatorCC wrote:

While I commend the Supreme Court for taking this case, the lackadaisical snail’s pace of justice generated, in widely-spaced increments, by our Judicial Branch is increasingly evident, with the other two branches of government willfully flouting Constitutional limits.

This petition should have been granted LAST SPRING — so that oral arguments would be imminent, rather than four months in the offing, while INNOCENT MEN ORDERED RELEASED continue to languish behind bars in our military prison, waiting for the comfort and convenience of judges and lawyers to be accommodated, SEVEN YEARS after our Constitution, if honored, would have effectuated their release.

The Supreme Court’s Boumediene decision was a pivotal fork in the road, reasserting a Constitutional Republic in lieu of a virtual Monarchy where Executive Might Makes Right, no questions asked by Congress. But justice delayed is justice denied, so the Supreme Court should emphasize that, by accelerating a briefing schedule and argument in this case – in which the D.C. Circuit has attempted to moot the Supreme Court’s Boumediene directive.

In addition to the fact that Congress evidently prefers replacing the Federal Bureau of INVESTIGATION (of actual crime scene evidence) with the Federal Bureau of (Coercive) INTERROGATION (no other “evidence” needed), note this fact pointed out yesterday by Senator Dick Durbin:

“What does it cost for us to hold a terrorist [SUSPECT, Dick...] at Guantanamo today? Mr. President, $435,000 a year. That is what it costs — dramatically more than the cost of incarcerating in America’s prisons.”

Obviously, the Government will put extra pressure on Palau to try to moot this; in the interim, we can certainly hope a flood of habeas counsel (say, the 75 recently “cleared for release” plus/minus the 17 or so who won their habeas petitions but still languish at GTMO) can jump on this to force the High Court to rule.