The Washington Post article also repeated and, unfortunately, perpetuated two fallacies about Guantánamo. First, it repeated the myth that the president is "[b]locked by Congress from releasing or transferring many of the remaining 164 detainees" from Guantánamo.
That is not so. Congress had passed legislation effectively blocking the president from transferring detainees to their home or other countries, but it then amended the law two years ago to allow the president to waive those restrictions.
As Carl Levin, the Chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee, pointed out, that amendment "provides a clear route for the transfer of detainees to third countries." The president has simply not used it.
The article also repeated another myth - that there are some "four dozen men [at Guantánamo] deemed too dangerous to release but who are ineligible for trial because evidence against them is inadmissible."
That line has been repeated time and again by the press, and never examined.
It is simply not true. The government's basis for detaining each of the men at Guantánamo is now publicly available on WikiLeaks. Members of the press can examine the evidence themselves. They should.
There are clearly some bad guys down there - generally acknowledged now as fewer than 20. These men can all be tried.
The only thing preventing their conviction is the Military Commission System itself, which is totally untested and ineffective. They would all have been convicted long ago in our federal courts. An examination of the government's basis for detaining the other men at Guantánamo shows that the reason they can't be tried is not because the evidence against them is inadmissible, but simply because it is so flimsy and speculative that it would be laughed out of any federal court in the country.
But how can there be a presumption of innocence at Guantánamo, when even innocent men who have long been cleared remain imprisoned?
No comments:
Post a Comment