‘Senior Defense Official’ Plans to Hold Guantanamo Detainees Pretty Much Forever

This is what has become of the American Way of Justice. This is what has become of the land that wanted to be the City on the Hill, the beacon to freedom, the model of the Rule of Law. Fellow citizens, be proud of what your government does in your name—or throw the rascals out.

Cuba Detentions May Last Years: Senior Defense Department officials said Thursday that they were planning to keep a large portion of the detainees at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, there for many years, perhaps indefinitely.

“But whether a person is to be charged before a military commission is not the reason we're holding them,” said the senior defense official. The official said it was possible that an individual could be convicted by a tribunal and serve a five-year sentence and then not be released if he were judged to remain a danger.

You want trials? OK we'll have kangaroo courts, without judicial supervision and no appeals to any Article III judges, not even the Supreme Court. And after we convict, they serve their time, and then we hold them some more.

There's actually a weird logic here: if you consider the detainees to be a species of POW in the 'War Against an Ism' and you understand that by its nature an Ism can't be defeated, it follows the war will last a very very long time. And we don't release enemy soldiers during the war, do we?

Only problem, of course, was that if the detainees were ordinary enemy soldiers the Geneva Convention would apply to them. And if we had doubts about their status our treaty obligations require us to resolve those doubts. But we're not going to do that. At least not until after the next election.

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