|
I agree with roachboy that the greatest problem with Gitmo is not what happens there but that it exists in the first place, and that it is framed as part of a war on terror.
As the documents show, the 'evidence' is really flimsy; the prosecutors and defense working the cases have known this for quite some time. It turns out that the evidence isn't flimsy in the context of a temporary detention on the battlefield; but it doesn't come within a light-year of meeting the criteria we consider a part of 'due process' in civilian judicial life, and of course the recourse afforded to the prisoners has been extremely limited. The military isn't trained to collect evidence the way that police and prosecutors are; the conditions in the field often make this extremely difficult to do; and in any case, the military don't see it as their job to be policemen, painstakingly rebuilding and preserving a trail of evidence about some set of events that happened in the past; their job is to do what it takes to stop the next bomb from going off and killing their buddies in a theater of fast-moving asymmetric war.
So at a tactical level, this all played out pretty logically - but strategically, it makes no sense. Based on some of the data posted above (grabbing taxi drivers, prisoners of the Taliban, etc) it seems as if the strategic plan was to wring Afghanistan dry of anyone with even loose connections to Al Qaeda, squeeze all these folks until they tell you everything you want to know, and then smash AQ with the resulting information. Unfortunately, it seems there wasn't really a plan B for what to do with the prisoners...
|