Justice in Guantanamo

# A high percentage, perhaps the majority, of the 500-odd men now held at Guantanamo were not captured on any battlefield, let alone on "the battlefield in Afghanistan" (as Bush asserted) while "trying to kill American forces" (as McClellan claimed).

# Fewer than 20 percent of the Guantanamo detainees, the best available evidence suggests, have ever been Qaeda members.

# Many scores, and perhaps hundreds, of the detainees were not even Taliban foot soldiers, let alone Qaeda terrorists. They were innocent, wrongly seized noncombatants with no intention of joining the Qaeda campaign to murder Americans.

# The majority were not captured by U.S. forces but rather handed over by reward-seeking Pakistanis and Afghan warlords and by villagers of highly doubtful reliability.

This is what happens when you let governments detain people without any type of due process.  They will arrest anyone without a thought as to their actual guilt.  As a result we now have a significant number of people that have very real reasons to hate America and if/when they go back home all of their loved ones will have legitimate reasons to hate America.  

There is no justified reason, if the detainees are really terrorists, if they were really caught “on the battlefield,”  are really trying to kill Americans that you couldn’t convince a judge of those facts.  If there are no facts then why are we detaining them?

In a just society due process should never be ignored, regardless of the circumstances.

HatTip:  Hit & Run