Goodbye Gulag?
"The most important aspect of the president's comment isn't just that he acknowledged, at least tacitly, that Gitmo is a disaster and must be closed; or even that he acknowledged that detainees have a basic right to some adjudicatory process. These two concessions are momentous, but they pale next to his admission that he is in any way bound by the decision of the high court -- that the court will have the last word on anything to do with the war on terror." Slate's Dahlia Lithwick dissects some surprising recent comments by Dubya on Guantanamo Bay, and ponders the future of the Gitmo Gulag. "[Recent] silent mass releases do suggest that Donald Rumsfeld's famous 2002 claim, that the then-760 prisoners at Guantanamo were 'the worst of the worst,' was something of an overstatement. They were probably closer to 'the best of the worst,' or as I've suggested, 'the least lucky of the middling.' The actual worst of the worst have been relegated to a whole other secret prison system that actually makes Guantanamo look rather attractive."
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But if you close Guantanamo, what do you do with the prisoners? That's the basic flaw in the whole extrajudicial prisons plan is that there's no way to return the prisoners to the US legal system once they hitthe shores of guantanamo of are rendered.
The only real options are to release them outright or turn them over to countries who won't care about the rights violations. That's the whole flaw in taking these prisoners out of the normal process.
Mike