Habeas Schmabeas

I just listened to last year's This American Life episode "Habeas Schmabeas" for the second time. I think that every American should hear the information that is in this episode. It is mainly about the detention center at Guantanamo Bay and features interviews with 2 of the former detainees. Basically, most of the information that our president has given us about Guantanamo and the people being held there is misleading, if not untrue. It points out the administrations blatant disregard for the law, both domestic and international. Here are some quotes from the beginning of the episode:

President Bush: These are people that got scooped off a battlefield, attempting to kill U.S. troops. And, uh, I want to make sure before they're released that they don't come back to kill again.

Dick Cheney: The people that are there are people we picked up on a battlefield...They're terrorists. They're bomb makers, they're facilitators of terror, they're members of Al Qaeda, the Taliban.

Jack Hitt: In a new study by Seton Hall's law school, researchers simply went to the trouble of reading the 517 Guantanamo case files released by the Pentagon. Here's what they found:

Only 5% of our detainees of Guantanamo were "scooped up" by American troops...The rest? We never saw them fighting. Only 8% of detainees in Guantanamo are classified by the Pentagon as Al Qaeda fighters. 86% of the detainees were handed over to us by Pakistan or the Northern Alliance....out of nearly 600 men at Guantanomo, the number who could give us useful information about Al Qaeda was "only a relative handful."

We were offering bounties of $5,000-10,000 in Pakistan for people who turned in Al Queda members. So apparently we bought a lot of the prisoners as well. One such person that we purchased was a publisher of a satirical magazine that offended some Pakistani leaders.

Many people who have been declared "No Longer Enemy Combatants", yet were still being held because officials couldn't figure out what to do with them. They are Uighur, a Muslim ethnic minority from China, and they cannot be returned to China because the Chinese government has a long standing campaign against the Uighur people. Why not give them political asylum in the U.S. Its the least we can do for holding them without cause for so many years. There are Uighur communities in the U.S. But instead, they continued to be detained.

So many of the people that have been held and tortured for years with no hearing and no charges aren't terrorists. And even if they are, is torturing them and denying them basic international rights a good precedent to be setting. This is not the last war we will fight, and the world will not forget how the U.S. declared itself to be above the Geneva Conventions.

And if you doubt that what has happened at Guantanamo is torture, check out this FBI report.

So what will the American people do? Apparently not much as seen at the last Republican debate when Mitt Romney called for the doubling of Guantanamo. And the people said, "Amen".