I have lost track all the things we can't do with the Gitmo detainees in order to shut the place down, and why exactly it is that we can't do them. I have lost track of all the places we can't send them, and why we can't send them there. I have lost track of all the reasons that we have to keep Gitmo open for another year, keep hanging on, hanging on, because we can't figure out what to do with the Gitmo detainees.
I don't see anything complicated about what to do with the Gitmo detainees...
1. Open the damn doors already.
I can't think of a single reason to keep these people under lock and key one more minute. I reject the whole "but some of them must be bad guys" argument. Really? Why? Because the alternative is unthinkable?
But OK, let's assume that they are Bad Guys, every last one. So what? We have thousands of murders, rapists, child molesters, thieves, and arsonists roaming our own streets, to say nothing of the corporate rapists and thieves currently living large on our tax dollars. What could these people possibly have done that makes it so damned important we not let them escape justice?
We know they didn't fly any planes into American buildings...those people are all dead. Could they have participated in this conspiracy? Sure. So could hundreds of thousands of other people. If our government had any solid evidence that these people are more likely to have been involved than anyone else, it should have tried and convicted them by now. It didn't, and the fact that this failure occurred under one administration and now we have another has nothing to do with it. Our government failed to bring them to trial, for whatever reason. A statute of limitations doesn't get extended just because you elect a new sheriff.
Could these people have killed American soldiers? Sure. But we don't know that they did. On the other hand, we can be damn sure that there are several thousand people living free who have killed American soliders because, you know, like 5,000 Americans have died in Iraq and Afghanistan already. And the kicker is...these people couldn't have killed hardly any of them. At the time almost all of these Americans were killed, these people were locked up in Gitmo. Irrefutable alibis, courtesy of the US government.
Regardless...since when have we or any other country ever tracked down and punished every single enemy soldier who killed an American during a war? Don't be ridiculous. Whatever these people did or did not do, they have been imprisoned for years now. That is "justice" enough already. Open the damn doors.
2. Open the damn windows too.
Fly their immediate family members down to Gitmo to see them. Send Doctors Without Borders to examine and treat them. Send a whole bunch of lawyers to advise them. And planes and planes and planes full of press people to interview them and take all the pictures they want. Without any lame whining about "matters of national security." Let's see some real transparency for a real change.
Redeploy all of the troops that are manning the facility. Let some of the international relief agencies take over its management. Pay them a whole bunch of money to do it. You know...KBR rates.
3. Give them whatever the hell they need to move on.
Give each of them $100,000. Why the hell not? Our government's been throwing money around like it grows on trees for years. Another $25 million isn't going to make a dent. Give them all passports. New identities if they want them. US citizenship, if that's what it takes.
From there, they are on their own. They are free to go wherever they want. If they want to go back home and rejoin the fight, so be it. We are talking about 250 people here, people. In the vast ocean of those who hate us and want to kill us and to destroy our way of life, they are hardly a drop.