We even refuse to send detainees back to their home countries because there is some indication that they might possibly be mistreated when they get there.

You make it sound like the government is setting them up for a life in the U.S. after it being found out they can’t go back. That’d be nice, but it’s often not the case.

In many cases, they’re not allowed here, either. And in some cases, nobody else will take them. So where do they go? You guessed it. Back to Guantanamo.

Claudia is right in the last paragraph. If McCain were in Obama’s position right now, he’d be looking at what to do with the prisoners there, too.

The fact that prisoners being held indefinitely with no charges until “the conflict is over” (presumably when there isn’t terrorism? You mean never?) “get hot meals” strikes me as a very very poor excuse. Tell you what, tell any American prisoner if they are willing to trade places with Gitmo detainees. They get the hot meals and the intact Koran, but are not guaranteed a trial date, may not be allowed into their own trial and their lawyers may e denied almost any access to evidence. Oh, and they may be submitted to “advanced interrogation tactics” to get them to confess. Get back to me when you find someone willing to do the trade.

This isn’t even a particularly partisan issue anymore. Both McCain and Obama pledged to close Guantanamo, based on pretty much the same reasons. They couldn’t debate it because they actually agree.

The fact we hold people there indefinitely without trial or the most basic of rights serves only to send the message to the world that America stands on it’s principles and ideals…until it gets scared.

It only says that to people who have bought the anti-war propaganda about Gitmo. History, however, is stuffed full of examples of civilized nations who have held illegal combatants until the end of hostilities in complete accordance with the Geneva Conventions, which is exactly what we have been doing.

Indeed, we have gone well beyond any legal obligations we have had. We have made the Koran proof from any sort of mistreatment, intentional or otherwise – the only book that enjoys such protection by US law. Prisoners at Gitmo routinely leave weighing more (thanks to the halal meals we prepare for them regularly) than when they were detained. We even refuse to send detainees back to their home countries because there is some indication that they might possibly be mistreated when they get there.

As I said earlier, we have two options with illegal combatants. We can hold them at Gitmo and try them at our leisure or we can try them on the battlefield as they have been taken. The latter choice leaves us with but two options – let them go or shoot them right there. I prefer what we have been doing. No nation has ever treated illegal combatants who specifically violate the Geneva Conventions more humanely nor with more deference.

Aside from the “torture thing” as you call it, this happens to US citizens in our current court system. (Not a very convincing argument.

Gee, did I say that? No, looks like I didn’t.

How in the world can anyone grant Constitutional rights to these detainees while also preserving the national security interests regarding intel?

So since the problem is difficult you simply decide that being detained and sent to Guantanamo instantly means you are a high-risk detainee and can be held without any review of your situation or any guarantee of a fair trial? Then, when it turns out that you were literally a nobody in the wrong place at the wrong time, what? Oops, sorry about the years in prison and that whole torture thing, our mistake. No hard feelings?

Pardon me for thinking we don’t have to sell our ideological soul to the altar of our supposed security. There are supposedly already mechanisms to deal with fair trials that involve sensitive security information. What I find totally unacceptable is that we are treating prisoners at Guantanamo as convicted criminals and not as what they are: people whose actual implication in actions against our country has not yet been determined in most cases. What few cases have gone to trial have often shown that we were holding and mistreating people who were barely foot soldiers, not people who were real threats to the US or who had huge secrets. The fact we hold people there indefinitely without trial or the most basic of rights serves only to send the message to the world that America stands on it’s principles and ideals…until it gets scared.

I’m afraid that you don’t understand the purpose of Guantanamo. It is not to press criminal cases. It is not to punish. It is to detain and only to detain.

If those illegal combatants were actual soldiers of an actual army, they would be held just as they are now, in a POW camp where they would be treated exactly as they are treated right now. Why should those who intentionally violate both the letter and the spirit of the Geneva Conventions be treated better than legitimate prisoners of war?

If we can not detain armed combatants during a time of war (a war that, by the way, we did not declare but instead was declared on us) without putting them immediately into our civil criminal justice system, thus crippling both it and our ability to reasonably prosecute the war, we are left with only one option.

I don’t think you’d approve of that one either.

So tell me, if we can not have this incredibly reasonable and unprecedentedly humane “black mark”, then what in the world can we have?