Andrew Sullivan sums it up. [1]
Guantanamo has been an incredibly ghastly episode for America. If any other country had done half of what we have done, our government and media would have condemned its behavior nonstop from day one. Yet I constantly meet people who think that all of the prisoners ever held at Guantanamo were beyond a doubt “terrorists.”
To make it clear, I suspect that many of the prisoners at Guantanamo presented threats to American interests. On the other hand, we owed a duty to every one of of those prisoners to quickly determine who was a threat and who wasn’t. Based on the statistics Sullivan cites, however, we had no clue whether most of those prisoners had done anything wrong. Yet we did next to nothing.
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