Lock ‘em Up: Throw Away the Key

The United States government’s War on Terror has been ongoing now since September 11, 2001, and for the last 11 ½ years 779 of the so-called “terrorist” prisoners have been held indefinitely without due process of law at the infamous War on Terror prison, Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, since it opened in January 2002.

Now the U.S. military sheepishly admits for the first time that only about 2.5 % of those 779 prisoners will ever be tried in a court of law for any alleged crimes. Only 20 of them will be prosecuted.

This means that 97.5 % of the evil “terrorist” prisoners have so far been held for more than a decade without the benefit of due process and without sufficient evidence that they are indeed terrorists or that they committed any crimes whatsoever against the United States.

President Obama, in January 2010, appointed an interagency task force to review the cases of Guantánamo prisoners. It recommended then that only 36 of them be tried. Now that number is down to only 20. And incidentally, a majority of the prisoners who actually were tired were either acquitted or had their convictions overturned by appellate courts.

That begs the question: Why weren’t the rest of these prisoners released long ago?

Obviously, there is not enough evidence against them. They’ve simply been detained indefinitely without probable cause, or whatever evidence there was against them was obtained by means CIA “black site” torture methods which would make it inadmissible in court.

The U.S. government recently released a list of 48 Guantánamo Bay prisoners who have never been charged with any crimes but now are designated as too dangerous to release even though they will never be prosecuted. They’ll just be imprisoned indefinitely without due process of law.

This is certainly not the first time that the United States government has simply swept aside the Constitution and the Bill of Rights by detaining large numbers of innocent people indefinitely without probable cause and due process of law.

President Roosevelt did it without any qualms to 110,000 entirely innocent Japanese American citizens by executive order in early 1942. He imprisoned them inside concentration internment camps, after the Japanese attack at Pearl Harbor, without the benefit of due process, just like Adolph Hitler and Joseph Stalin did to their people.

And just like with Adolph Hitler, Roosevelt’s action was entirely racist motivated because he did it to thousands of Japanese Americans but not to any German or Italian Americans whose governments had declared war upon the United States.

I think it goes without saying then that if the U.S. government War on Terror prisoners were Christians instead of Muslims there would never have been any prison at Guantánamo Bay to begin with, and if the evidence against any Christian prisoner were insufficient to charge them with crimes, they would have been released and allowed to go home from the get go.

But when we’re talking about radical Islamic prisoners, our Constitution doesn’t apply.

The policy is to lock ‘em up and throw away the key.