The Supreme Court Backs Guantanamo Bay Prisoners

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unsung wrote:

I will ask this again because maybe it was missed the other two times.

These innocent people, that are not from Afghanistan, in what country were they captured?

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Falsehoods About Guantanamo

This is not to deny that many of the 500-odd men now held at Guantanamo and some of the 256 others already released (including 76 to the custody of their home countries) were captured on Afghan battlefields or were terrorists, or both. Nor is it to deny the difficulty of knowing with confidence which detainees could safely be released. Indeed, several released detainees have ended up rejoining Taliban forces in Afghanistan.

But reporter Corine Hegland's exhaustively researched cover story in this issue—studded with probative details and human stories that every serious student of the war against terror should read—provides powerful evidence confirming what many of us have suspected for years:


A high percentage, perhaps the majority, of the 500-odd men now held at Guantanamo were not captured on any battlefield, let alone on "the battlefield in Afghanistan" (as Bush asserted) while "trying to kill American forces" (as McClellan claimed).


Fewer than 20 percent of the Guantanamo detainees, the best available evidence suggests, have ever been Qaeda members.


Many scores, and perhaps hundreds, of the detainees were not even Taliban foot soldiers, let alone Qaeda terrorists. They were innocent, wrongly seized noncombatants with no intention of joining the Qaeda campaign to murder Americans.


The majority were not captured by U.S. forces but rather handed over by reward-seeking Pakistanis and Afghan warlords and by villagers of highly doubtful reliability.

My estimates above are based largely on extrapolation from Hegland's analysis of these 132 federal court files. They appear to be reasonably representative of the men still at Guantanamo; certainly, the government has given no indication that its evidence is any weaker in these 132 cases than in the other 370 or so.

It is, therefore, quite remarkable to learn (from Hegland) that well over half (75) of the 132 are not even accused of fighting the United States or its allies on any battlefield in post-9/11 Afghanistan or anywhere else.

Indeed, only 35 percent of them (more precisely, of the 115 whose court files specify the locus of capture) were seized in Afghanistan; 55 percent were picked up by Pakistanis in Pakistan.

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I hope ome of these helps.

Peace