GITMO Prisoners: What Would You Do?
Lindsey Graham is taking some heat on liberal blogs right now for endorsing "indefinite detention" of some GITMO detainees, but I have to agree with what Graham is saying—even if the reason why kills me.
Graham told Fox News today that he actually agrees with President Obama's decision to close the Guantanamo Bay detention center but does question what we'd do with the detainees.
GRAHAM: I do believe we can close Gitmo, but what to do with them? Repatriate some back to other countries makes sense, if you can do it safely. Some of them will be tried for war crimes. And a third group will be held indefinitely because the sensitive nature of the evidence may not subject them to the normal criminal process, but if you let them go, we'll be letting go someone who wants to go back to the fight. ... So we've got three lanes we've got to deal with: Repatriation, trials, and indefinite detention.
The problem is he's right, but not because the information we have on them is sensitive—we conduct trials in this country where sensitive information is presented all the time—it's that the information was extracted through torture. That means that the Bush administration, by ordering suspects be tortured, has rendered these cases unwinnable.
I don't doubt for a second that we have some dangerous guys penned up in GITMO and I certainly don't want them wandering the streets but I also don't like that we've abandoned one of the critical principles of our justice system, which is the right to see the evidence against us and refute it.
So now Obama has another impossible question at his feet thanks to the bungling of the Bush administration: do we release known terrorists because we simply cannot prosecute them with tainted evidence or do we piss all over a pillar of our legal system in the name of safety? I'm glad it's not my decision to make.
Comments
Sentence them to eternity on Bush's ranch in Crawford, TX.
Posted by: Jude | January 21, 2009 8:25 PM