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Even if a Guantanamo prisoner is acquitted on all counts at his trial, the Pentagon may still not release him on grounds he might return to the battlefield, according to an article in the April 14th issue of The New Yorker.
The magazine’s Jeffrey Toobin quotes Brig. General Thomas Hartmann, legal adviser to the Pentagon’s Office of Military Commissions, as saying, “What’s unusual about what we’re doing is that we’re having the commissions before the end of the war.
By this reasoning, Toobin writes, “even those Guantanamo detainees who are acquitted of the charges against them are analogous to Nazi war criminals.” Curiously, hundreds of Guantanamo prisoners --- once depicted by former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld as “the worst of a very bad lot” --- have already been released.
This raises the suspicion they were innocent victims of dragnet arrests or sold to the U.S. by Afghan bounty hunters to enlarge the picture of thousands of Islamist terrorists seething to attack America.
As Clive Stafford Smith, a detainees’ lawyer, told The New Yorker: “Now that it’s clear that Guantanamo is such an embarrassment, they are just shipping as many of them (captives) out the door as they can, and just keeping enough of them to save face. It’s a political process that has little to do with terrorism.”
Yet what does it matter? Even if proved innocent before his all-military panel, Khadr could be held as long as the occupant of the White House says the War on Terror continues! For many in the Middle East and elsewhere, the legalized duplicity shaping up at Gitmo won’t just give America one black eye but two, plus a broken nose, a fat lip, and a mouthful of loose teeth --- as George Bush whacks away at the Statue of Liberty with his war club.