Pentagon Backs Down (Again)

Our interest is in not trying them and letting them out. Our interest is in -- during this global war on terror [sic] -- keeping them off the streets, and so that's what's taking place. -- Donald H. Rumsfeld, September 2003

Everybody has a desire not to hold people that need not be held. And it's conceivable, and I'm not saying that this is the way it will end up, it is conceivable that people who can be determined no longer needing to be held need not necessarily be part of a judicial process if we can make that determination short of a judicial process -- that's all I'm saying. And that's, those are the kinds of questions that are being evaluated right now. There's been no decisions as far as I know. There are some number of detainees down there who may in fact be, after review, the types of individuals that can be repatriated, wherever they may come from. -- Pentagon Spokesman Larry De Rita, June 2004

Why is the Bush Administration no longer "interested" in keeping detainees locked up indefinitely without trial, rather than sending back to "wherever they may come from"? Yeah, the Supreme Court ruling informing it that its practices are illegal.

But if it's able to "review" the situations of individual detainees now, why couldn't it have done so two weeks ago? Or two months ago? Or two years ago?

And again we come back 'round to a most basic, obvious question. How would the Bush Administration react were American citizens to be captured from the United States, on suspicion of having committed some nebulous crime; and then winged half-way around the world to be held in atrocious conditions, indefinitely, without any chance of a trial?

And the obvious corollary: how, now, do we expect American citizens will be treated when they are in future captured -- regardless of their guilt or innocence?

Of course, there's yet another angle from which this issue may be looked. Namely, that Rumsfeld's bumbling attempts at coherence notwithstanding, the Administration has consistently portrayed the Guantanamo detainees as ruthless terrorists, who will take up their jihadi cause as soon as they are set free. So now that they're going to be set free, we can only assume that the Bush Administration wants them to be out perpetrating acts of terror. (Yeah, sure, the Supreme Court has ordered their status changed. But legal niceties have never troubled the Bush Administration before now. Dubya could simply keep them all locked up in Guantanamo, and claim he doesn't need a "permission slip" from the Supreme Court to allow him to carry on with his divine mission of protecting "the lives and the liberty of the American people.")

Posted by Eddie Tews at July 1, 2004 06:45 PM