http://thislife.org/...
The public radio show "This American Life" had a great program last weekend about the innocence of some of the prisoners at Guantanomo. An audio link is available above on the left side of that linked page. "Act One" is the best part. The reporter was also interviewed on Majority Report on Air America a couple days ago.
The piece explains that a group of anti-Communist Chinese Muslims were put into Guantanomo. Everyone realizes that they were not terrorists, but they are still being kept. They have been reclassified to no longer be "enemy combatants." US says they can't send them back to China because the Chinese would kill them, but the US won't find any other place for them. The reporter said he thinks the US doesn't want to release them because then the US would see that many harmless people have been imprisoned.
The report explains that a guy who simply ran a satirical website in Pakistan was thrown into Guantanomo. He had made fun of a Pakistani Cleric, and the Cleric told the US he was a terrorist.
The report said the US courts finally said that detainees have a right to an attorney, but the US is not letting those lawyers into the hearings.
The evidence against each person is classified. The detainee and their lawyers are not allowed to see it, and there were cases in which the military judges said they had not seen the evidence.
The worst was a case against a German of Turkish background named Murat Kurnaz. His secret file was accidentally made public. It included 6 letters from US and German agencies saying that they had no evidence against the guy. That "evidence" was not shown at his hearing and was not made available to his attorneys.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A3868-2005Mar26.html
Kurnaz is still held at Guantanamo. His case is being publicized by Amnesty International. The "evidence" showing a lack of evidence against him was accidentally declassified after his hearing. That "evidence" has now been made classified again, after it was published on the front page of the Washington Post. Except of 2005 Post article:
"...that evidence, recently declassified and obtained by The Washington Post, shows that U.S. military intelligence and German law enforcement authorities had largely concluded there was no information that linked Kurnaz to al Qaeda, any other terrorist organization or terrorist activities.
In recently declassified portions of a January ruling, a federal judge criticized the military panel for ignoring the exculpatory information that dominates Kurnaz's file and for relying instead on a brief, unsupported memo filed shortly before Kurnaz's hearing by an unidentified government official. Kurnaz has been detained at Guantanamo Bay since at least January 2002.
"The U.S. government has known for almost two years that he's innocent of these charges," said Baher Azmy, Kurnaz's attorney. "That begs a lot of questions about what the purpose of Guantanamo really is. He can't be useful to them. He has no intelligence for them. Why in the world is he still there?"
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http://www.csmonitor.com/...
The above link is to a new article in the Christian Science Monitor about the innocent Chinese being held in Guantanamo.
The following article from last week describes how the 5 British detainees at Guantanamo were released by Britain because they were shown to not be a threat.
http://www.usatoday.com/...
The author of the story on This American Life said that there is evidence that one of the people released from Guantanamo really was Al Qaida. He is now living free in California. This defeats the whole argument that the Administration would rather keep people in custody just in case they might be terrorists.
Many people ended up in Guantanamo because they were turned over by other people in Afghanistan that wanted to collect bounties paid by the US. It became a convenient way to get rid of a person's tribal enemies and get paid for it.
The whole process of habeas corpus involves having proper legal review of whether a person should be confined. The Bush Administration has used Guantanamo Bay because they feel it is outside the jurisdiction of the US court system, and therefore there is no right of habeas corpus. The report on This American Life describes the last time that approach was used in Britain. In the early 1600s, a top official in the British government sent a group of Pilgrims to a far off island for confinement to avoid the British court system. He was impeached for it.