As for most of them, though, we don’t know what they stand for and we don’t know what they’ve done. The federal government is doing its best to make sure that we don’t know how many of these people have done anything that threatens America.

There is credible evidence that

most of the detainees are not Afghans and that most were not picked up on the battlefield in Afghanistan. The vast majority were instead captured in Pakistan. Seventy-five of the 132 men are not accused of taking part in hostilities against the United States. The data suggests that maybe 80 percent of these detainees were never al-Qaida members, and many were never even Taliban foot soldiers.

http://www.slate.com/id/2136422/

Here’s another account:

http://www.nationaljournal.com/about/njweekly/stories/2006/0203nj4.htm

What evidence do you have to back up your across-the-board conclusion that all of the prisoners at Guantanamo have tried to damage America or Americans in any way?

If you don’t give them some sort of unbiased hearing, we’ll never know whether they belong at Guantanamo. Or at least that’s the way I see it in my evidence-based way of thinking.

Whatever is going on in these misbegotten military kangaroo courts needs to be made more visible. We need cameras in those faux courtrooms to allow Americans to see the brand of justice that prohibits the accused from seeing the evidence or from calling witnesses in his or her defense. The government should be made to install webcams all over Gitmo (and at all of the other torture centers) so that we can see how our own government employees are treating prisoners. We need to see this treatment sufficiently often that we become sickened enough by it that we will pick up our phone or write a letter or attend a march.

What the Bush Administration is doing is insanity. The fact that this SCOTUS decision was only 5 to 4 is equally insane. This was an obvious call in favor of the prisoners.

At least now, in light of Boumediene v. Bush, some of the prisoners will have at least a chance that a neutral judge will consider their plight “out in the sunshine” of a real courtroom.

The U.S. military hid the locations of suspected terrorist detainees and concealed harsh treatment to avoid the scrutiny of the International Committee of the Red Cross, according to documents that a Senate committee released Tuesday.

http://www.mcclatchydc.com/homepage/story/41394.html

The United States never tortured and abused Nazi POWs the way we have tortured and abused and murdered many innocent detainees in American custody in this war. This is not slandering America, as this president would have it. It’s the God-honest truth.

http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2008/06/disgrace.html

The mind reels at what it must be like to be rounded up like so many cattle from one’s home, as one’s family’s terrified screams grow distant, as one’s own voice is hoarse from crying, as one is sent across an ocean to be locked up with terrorists, denied anything resembling a trial, fed on the meagerest semblances of sustenance, for years on end.

The depth of this injustice defies measurement, and it is appalling that it took two years to undo this law that never should have passed in the first place. I count every drop of blood shed in Guantanamo and by the families of innocent prisoners on the hands of the administration that, crippled by fear and blinded by prejudice, loosed such a despicable affront to freedom on the world.

And, indeed, the minimal margin of victory in the Supreme Court is a testament to the position of the nation. This knife’s-edge balancing act cannot long sustain itself, and my worst fear is that of a disturbed nation electing another disturbed President, and forcing us off the wrong side of this precarious situation.

I guess, come November, we will know the fate of this nation and, thus, the world. I for one think it’s about time for another JFK, not another GWB.