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Comment by jfengel | Hacker News Reader

I really wish Biden had just ended Guantanamo. I fully believe that the people remaining there are the worst of the worst, and would do tremendous harm if released, or even given access to the American judicial system. But Guantanamo is a massive stain on America's reputation, a judicial no-man's-land every bit as bad as the gulags of the Soviet Union.

I cannot believe that we are sending people there. They're not even accused of terrorism; they were not captured as illegal combatants.

This is shameful. We should be ashamed of ourselves. I know that the world is ashamed of us.

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Worst of the worst is certainly what the media parroted. However, from 2011

A newly found 2003 memo by former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld appears to directly contradict claims that Guantanamo held only the “worst of the worst” suspected terrorists.

“We need to stop populating Guantanamo Bay (GTMO) with low-level enemy combatants,” Rumsfeld says in the memo, addressed to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

https://web.archive.org/web/20210827120559/http://voices.was...

That was almost certainly true in 2003. Some prisoners have been moved out since then.

I don't actually know whether what remains truly is the "worst of the worst". I'm willing to accept it for the sake of argument: even if it's true, we look like monsters for not affording them a trial after a quarter-century.

Guantanamo as a prison camp is, IMO, shameful.

The naval base itself is rarely discussed but a critical port for deep water US Naval operations in the Caribbean.

Are they being held there indefinitely? I was under the impression it was a temporary relocation until they could be forwarded to country of origin? But I frankly can't remember if I've seen any argument from the govt about why they're sending them to gitmo

Last I read (though it's been awhile), Guantanamo was still housing an aging group of indefinite detainees from the war on terror to the tune of much more than a million per head per year (healthcare costs being the biggest expense).

How many more years do they need to be there to be indefinite?

2001 to 2025 is 24 years. These guys are portrayed as being the worst terrorist imaginable but a lot of them are just guys whose neighbor wanted a goat for reporting a terrorist (accurate or not).

The existence of Guantanamo is just about illegal. Cuba doesn't want it there and won't cash our checks to pay for it. It's the perfect place to send people for an administration that looks to skate around and break the law as much as possible.

Presumably, the government wants to get them repatriated as soon as possible. But they will be there until that happens, which could be forever.

The reason they're sending them to Guantanamo is so that they have no access to the US courts. They cannot challenge their arrest. For all we know, some of these could be US citizens.

They can, and have, challenged their detention in US courts. There is a ton of litigation on this. It's just that... they are still there, somehow :(

Justice William Brennan once said "The Bill of Rights was designed to protect the rights of the minority, the rights of the despised, the rights of the powerless, against the majority".

Attorney Harvey Silverglate also stated, "The rights of the accused are the rights of all of us. If the government can ignore the Constitution and the Bill of Rights for people it doesn't like, it can do so for anyone".

Obama should have shut it, Biden should have shut it. Now here we are. Turn it into a wildlife preserve if you don't want to hand it over to the Cubans.

Obama tried and was stopped by Congress, Biden made token gestures towards closing it to appease his base but I don't think he was actually opposed to it.

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